US sanctions on Iran are meant to harm the people

By Stephen Lendman

Throughout the post-World War Two period the US has imposed sanctions against a dozen scores of countries, many many countries. They have no legitimacy.

Number one, they are invalid according to international law. Only Security Council members, a majority of Security Council members can impose sanctions on any country or entity or individual. According to the UN Charter, individual countries cannot do this and if they do it they are breaking the law. They're breaking international law, and other countries should ignore the sanctions, which of course they don't when the US imposes them.

They may ignore them if some other country imposes them on a non-Western one, but they certainly don't ignore them when the US imposes them.

Well, sanctions never work. I wrote an article last week, quoting an expert on the subject, who says historically, he's really talking about the post-World War Two era, that's when this stuff really began, he said they work about 5% of the time. So 95% of the time, sanctions do not work. The big example he gave of sanctions working was South Africa when it had an apartheid system.

Well, I think that was crumbling by its own weight anyway. I don't know whether the sanctions did the job, maybe sanctions. It was the final coup de grâce that took the system down, but even when it was taken down it was like a Jim Crow with the US. Jim Crow just overt discrimination against Black people in the US. Well, Jim Crow is gone, but the same discrimination in the US exists.

So apartheid in South Africa is gone, but the same dirty system exists. Black people are worse off today because of neoliberal harshness and related policies than they were during the apartheid era. It ended in the early 1990s. So it was meaningless. But sanctions do not work. It's as simple as that. They practically never work. But they are used by the US, by other countries, other Western countries, and other non-Western countries as well.

So why are they imposed if they never work? Well, I think in the case of the US there is a lot of spite involved in it. Also, the US does it to do deliberately harm the people of the countries targeted - their citizens, their residents, to suffocate them, to deprive them of the necessities of life, which is what's going on with Iran. The US wants Iran deprived of medical care, of food to eat, of anything that will make the lives miserable, hoping that if this happens, the people of Iran and other countries where the same thing happens will blame the government but they don't do that. They blame the country that's imposing the hardships on them. That's the way it happens. That's the way it is every time.

US sanctions designed to impact Iranian people psychologically: Expert

The continual rounds of US sanctions are designed to impact the Iranian people psychologically, according to Patrick Lawrence.

I remember during the 2011 US war on Libya, I remember a poll, I don't remember who conducted it. It was a poll on the sentiment of the Libyan people about the Gaddafi government at the time. His popularity in Libya 2011 again rose to a higher level than it ever did before, during that war. Why? Because the Libyan people could only look to him, could only look to the Libyan Government for whatever help they could get to defend themselves against the attacks that were being carried out by the US and NATO.

So they didn't turn on their government. They looked to the government and they wanted support from their government to give them whatever it was possible to do. Gaddafi did whatever he could do. He simply didn't have the military strength of the US and NATO. No country has except maybe Russia, maybe China, which is the reason the US doesn't attack those countries. And if the US ever attacked Iran it's possible though I doubt it, but it is possible Iran is a much stronger country militarily than any country the US attacked for the post World War Two era.

You know what happened in Vietnam, Southeast Asia. The US left with its tail between its legs, defeated even against Korea. It ended in an uneasy armistice. The US didn't win. I mean it just killed an awful lot of North Koreans, killed an awful lot of Southeast Asians, but it didn't win either of those wars. It has won none of that it has waged in the new millennium, but it's certainly done an awful lot of the damage, killed a lot of people, eviscerated a lot of people, but accomplished nothing except for the weapons makers making a lot of money.

So the US does these things. There was a comment made by Trump, which was one of the few things he said that's accurate, and he said something like, it's what we do. Well, that's exactly right. It's what the US does referring to sanctions, I call those wars by other means. Hot wars, pre-emptive wars against country threatening nobody. It's what the US does. It's what imperialism is all about. It doesn't accomplish anything. Over time, it's self-defeating. The US is a pariah state. It's become more of a pariah state over time and the power of the US and the respect the US had when World War Two ended in the 1940s before an attack on Korea.

It started going downhill at that point, but it has such respect for the world community, defeating the scourge of fascism and Imperial Japan, and it blew it all by its own fascism and war on humanity, and it does the same thing against Americans. It does overseas, not sanctions, but other things that inflict enormous harm on Americans, millions of Americans. So America is losing the battle to stay on top of the world as the most respected and admired country to just the opposite. America is a nation in decline, and all the time I have no doubt the US - Imperial USA will end up in the dustbin of history where it belongs.

Iran rights council: US criminal sanctions target Iranians’ lives, health

Iran’s top human rights council says the latest US sanctions on Iranian financial systems and banks are taking direct aim at Iranian people’s lives and health.

*Stephen Lendman, born in 1934 in Boston, started writing on major world and national issues began in summer 2005. In early 2007, radio hosting followed. Lendman now hosts the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network three times weekly. Distinguished guests are featured. Listen live or archived. Major world and national issues are discussed. Lendman is a 2008 Project Censored winner and 2011 Mexican Journalists Club international journalism award recipient.

He wrote this article for Press TV website.

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