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Ratcheting Up Sanctions on Iran Is the Wrong Approach
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| Fir3start3r |
An interesting perspective and a better strategy IMHO...
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March 27, 2007
Ratcheting Up Sanctions on Iran Is the Wrong Approach
By Ivan Eland | View comments
Broadening the sanctions changes their main purpose from being instrumental to being merely punitive.
The conventional wisdom for dealing with Iran is demanding repeatedly that the Iranians end their uranium enrichment program, and slapping on new sanctions. Although the December 2006 United Nations Security Council sanctions that banned countries from exporting nuclear and missile materials and technology to Iran probably were prudent, widening the sanctions outside the nuclear and missile areas is a mistake.
Broadening the sanctions changes their main purpose from being instrumental to being merely punitive. Although any kind of sanction is prone to evasion, an instrumental embargo which attempts to deny Iran the materials and technology needed to make a nuclear weapon and to deliver long distances via a missile could at least slow Iranian acquisition of such ingredients, or raise the price to do so. A comprehensive ban on weapons sales, cutting off loans to the Iranian government, and freezing the assets of important Iranian individuals and institutions have little to do with keeping Iran from getting nuclear and missile materials and technology. Thus, widening the measures beyond this narrow purpose turns sanctions into punitive symbolism.
Such punishment seems misplaced when no conclusive proof yet exists that Iran has an illegal nuclear weapons program. Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has a right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. Although there are reasons to suspect that Iran has an illegal nuclear weapons program, it has not been proven.
Unfortunately, permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — their own sizeable nuclear arsenals being their major qualification for membership in the body — seem in the eyes of many nations to be hypocritical for seeking to deny Iran a nuclear capability. The United States’ credibility was further reduced when it cut a deal to provide nuclear fuel and technology to India, a state with nuclear weapons which has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Also, the United States provides billions in assistance to its allies Israel and Pakistan, both nuclear weapons states which have also spurned the treaty.
For these reasons, U.S. leadership in the U.N. Security Council to punish the Iranians for ostensibly legal activities creates a “rally-around-the-flag” effect in Iran. Although not as pronounced as it would be if the United States were to conduct air strikes against Iran, sanctions do allow the Iranian regime to create an external enemy in order to win more support from Iran’s restive, youthful population, which is disaffected with the Iranian government’s austere Islamic rule.
Moreover, any broader measures intended to commercially isolate Iran from the world would be a move toward shutting off the very ideas that could eventually topple the despotic regime. Ideas subversive to the regime’s hold on power accompany Western products and technologies into Iran.
Even many opponents of U.S. military action against Iran approve of broader sanctions as an apparent substitute for war. History shows, however, that sanctions can instead lead to war. Once the punitive road is selected, when sanctions fail — as they often do — to have the desired effect on the target country, pressure for military action can intensify. Two examples spring immediately to mind. When stringent financial sanctions against the Panamanian regime of Manuel Noriega embarrassingly failed to depose him, President George H.W. Bush then felt overwhelming pressure to oust him militarily — which he did, through an invasion of Panama in 1989. That same President went to war with Saddam Hussein in 1991, when the most comprehensive and grinding sanctions in world history failed to compel Saddam to withdraw Iraqi troops from Kuwait. Thus, starting down the road of broader punitive sanctions may lead ultimately to war with Iran.
Instead, Iran should be given positive incentives to forego its nuclear weapons program. If the Iranians forswear their uranium enrichment efforts, the United States should offer to reintegrate Iran into the world, economically and politically, and sign a pact pledging not to attack that nation. Given that Iran lives in the vicinity of a nuclear Israel, and has other potentially hostile neighbors, even this offer may not make the Iranians willing to give up their nuclear program.
As the United States accepted and deterred a nuclear China in the 1960s, when radical Mao Zedong was at its helm, it may ultimately have to accept and deter, with the world’s most potent nuclear arsenal, a nuclear Iran. History shows that when countries get nuclear weapons they usually moderate their behavior — for example, China, India, and Pakistan have become more responsible internationally after going nuclear. Like the governments in these other countries, the first aim of the Iranian regime is to survive and stay in power. Threatening a superpower with thousands of warheads would put that important goal at risk.
In sum, a strategy of negotiation with positive incentives, and deterrence if that fails, is superior to broad, punitive sanctions that only make the autocratic Iranian regime stronger.
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| MrSquirrel |
This was a nice article.
Sanctions have proven over time to not work, with a multitude of cases in point (Iraq, North Korea, Milosovic run Yugoslavia, and Cuba being the most obvious). All they do is give already autocratic leaderships another tool with which to convince the populace of their countries that the outside world is to blame for their problems.
A regime with a stranglehold on power will find a way to get the things they need to continue their standard of living, regardless of how much the rest of the world tries to keep those things out of their hands.
Of course, in the grand scheme of things, this whole current situation with Iran was created by calling them a member of an Axis of Evil when there was a large amount of public, and government sympathy and cooperation with the U.S. in dealing with the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. I may be wrong, as I cannot go back and change the speech to see if not mentioning Iran in that way would have made a difference after all, but I firmly believe that the current hardline regime in Iran would not have had as much popular support as it did to gain power had Bush not thrown that curveball into his State of the Union address that year. Moderate reformers were in political office, and the Iranian people were, at least from the reports I have read, more inclined to feel that time had come to begin to bury the hatchets of 1954 and 1979.
I guarantee that the situation in Iraq would be somewhat less of a nightmare than it is now if the Iranians were still under a more moderate leadership.
But the administration has shown that they prefer to have "adversaries" on the world stage that are similiarly inclined to grandstand and spout firey rhetoric and hate speech, than to have adversaries that one could actually have an intelligent discourse with.
Such is life, eh?
MrS |
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| Haunted |
sanctions don't work, agreed.
but what does given the situation? |
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