In a brief moment of lucidity, Bush once said that the US has sanctioned itself out of having any leverage over Iran. So, new sanctions on Iran have been announced. Great job, Bush! If you're in a hole, dig deeper! Decreasing US leverage over Iran is really a right move. While you're at it, why not shoot yourself in the other foot too.
The title of this post, the "Strangling of Persia
", is a reference to the title of a book by an American named Morgan Shuster who was appointed in 1911 by the newly (and briefly) consititutional government of Iran to help organize its finaces. Shuster was forced out of the country only a year later as a result of "British and Russian diplomatic intrigue" which toppled Iran's constitutional government (the Russians actually shelled Iran's Parliament building and the British landed forces in the Persian Gulf region) and so he wrote an firsthand account of his expereinces that reveals much about how Great Power interference shaped Iran's history in those days. Read" Strangling of Persia.
My point is that in the context of the Iranian's view of history, the US has now started to fill the same historical role as the colonial British and Russian government. To this day, the Iranians revile the British and Russians, and especially the Iranian government officials who gave into the British/Russian demands on Iran - but most Americans are totally ignorant of that historical context and so they don't understand how their sanctions are playing in Iran.
So while the State Department is on a PR roll about its "tough" and "unprecedented" sanctions - which are in fact a sign of US weakness for reasons explained below - there is not a single mention of how these sanctions will appear in the minds of Iranians. That is a significant problem, because - as usual - they're understimating the fact that the Iranians love their country too, and deeply resent this sort of thing. And no, the Iranians are not going to topple their regime because of US sanctions - you'd think that 50 years of sanctions on Cuba would have proven that thesis wrong by now. Oh sure, the people pushing these sanctions also pay lip service to "respecting the people of Iran" and engaging in "public diplomacy" that will show how the US is not opposed to them but only the government of Iran - but lets face it, the US's "public diplomacy" efforts in the Mideast have been an absolute, total, miserable failure all along because they can't get over the fundamental problem of Israel. Despite the fact that Iranians like Americans and do not associate individual Americans with the Bush administration's policies, the "public diplomacy" efforts are made particularly worse in Iran by the US shooting down of Iran Air 655, support for Saddam during the war, creating the mess in Iraq, etc. So in short, no amount of propaganda and flim-flam is going to trick the Iranian people into thinking that the US actually has their best interests in mind by imposing sanctions on Iran, and only silly people would assume so.
Anyway, as to the sanctions themselves: despite the State Department's PR blitz, I'm not particularly impressed by these sanctions for a variety of reasons. These are something like the 10th set of US sanctions announced on Iran - and what good were the other 9? As a simple practical matter, Iran doesn't have any assets in the US to be seized. What few assets Iran did have, were seized long ago (even though pursuant to the Algiers Agreement, they were supposed to be released but the US has failed to abide by that agreement) which is why some pro-Israeli organizations have been trying to seize museum artifacts in the US that once came from ancient Persia - out of pure greed as usual. Nor is there a large trade between the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and American firms (which are all already prohibited by previous sanctions laws.)
In fact, that the Bush administration has resorted to these "unilateral" sanctions actually goes to show that the rest of the world isn't following the US's agenda towards Iran and the Bush administration isn't finding it easy to get the UN Security Council to issue new sanctions either. (Other than Israel, of course, which is instigating this conflict between the US and Iran to serve its own interests - which is why the pro-Israeli lobbyists have been frothing at the mouth about Iran so much lately.) Nor is there, in effect, anything "unprecedented" here. The US already imposes sanctions on the entire government of Iran - all they're doing now is that they're imposing sanctions on individual elements within the government, as if that makes some sort of difference.
I suppose Condi Rice needed to burnish her "tough on Iran" credentials to appease the rabid pro-Israeli Right, and so promoting these "tough" sanctions does that for her. And the pro-Israeli Right are smart enough to know that the sanctions won't have any actual impact on Iran - if anything, the sanctions strengthen the hardliners there and ensure that the US has even less leverage over Iran - but short of a war, the Israelis satisfied as long as there's yet another impediment to improved US-Iran relations - which has been their goal all along since any improved US-Iran relations would pose a threat to Israel's strategic value to the US and their ambitions on the Mideast.
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