Sanctions won’t work. Ray Takeyh, who worked on Iran with Dennis Ross at the State Department before losing his job last month and returning to the Council on Foreign Relations, told me that “sanctions are the feel-good option.”
Yes, it feels good to do something, but it doesn’t necessarily help.
See Robert Pape's Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work. (PDF) and Pape's follow-up, Why Economic Sanction Still Do Not Work (abstract only).
Cohen's reason for why they won't in this particular case are compelling:
One: Iran is inured to sanctions after years of living with them and has in Dubai a sure-fire conduit for goods at a manageable surtax. Two: Russia and China will never pay more than lip-service to sanctions. Three: You don’t bring down a quasi-holy symbol — nuclear power — by cutting off gasoline sales. Four: sanctions feed the persecution complex on which the Iranian regime thrives.
I don't completely agree with this:
Iran’s sense of humiliation is rooted in its America complex; its nuclear program is above all about the restoration of pride.
The America complex is part of a larger anti-Western imperialism complex.
Where Cohen goes wrong is his analysis of the situation as primarily between the US and Iran. In this case, then living with a nuclear Iran is no big deal. The US can easily counterbalance that. If you add Israel into the analysis, then the situation gets dicier but Israel can counterbalance too. All of this assuming Iran is a rational actor, which I think is a reasonable assumption. They aren't going to nuke Israel when Tehran will hit 1 million degrees a couple of hours later.
Yet, we still haven't analyzed the full situation, and I think this is where Cohen goes wrong. There are a whole bunch of countries in the area with a predominately Arab, Sunni Muslim population that aren't going to be too happy with a Shi'a Persian Nuke. The danger is not entirely from what Iran will do.
In fact, that's probably not the largest danger. The largest danger is an arms race launched by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and perhaps others. Why wouldn't they? If Iran becomes a de facto accepted nuclear power, then they will be scared as shit and the nonproliferation regime will have been proven a farce. What's to stop them?
The important question is whether our allies in the region will accept our nuclear umbrella as adequate protection from an Iranian bomb. My guess is that they will say they do in communiqués, but not mean it.
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3 comments:
FLG, interesting.
Going anecdotal, early on in the Clinton years I had dinner with Archbishop So-So (Tutu). (An extremely generous friend coughed up the $$$$$$ for me to go and that was the evening I met Rosa Parks.) Anyhoo, the Archbish gave a speech where he criticized George Bush Sr heavily. What, according to the Archbish, had George Bush done to earn his hatred because it was hatred on full vent display?
George Bush was unwilling to toughen the sanctions against South Africa. According to the Archbish, he met (or spoke) with Bush personally pleading with him to toughen the sanctions to bring an end to apartheid. Bush refused to increase them because he felt sanctions didn't work and more than that, they hurt the people too much. He wasn't willing to increase the suffering of the people. The Archbish told him the people would be willing to suffer more (Can't recall if he used the word gladly but since he knew his bible he may very well have) because their suffering was a righteous reason - to bring an end to apartheid.
As we all know and knew that evening, apartheid did end. The Archbishop told us that it was George Bush's fault it hadn't ended sooner. And the room - with loads of Episcopalian priests dotting all the tables- clapped loudly. (Our table was silent one.) The man who bought my ticket leaned over and said,
"He's walking away tonight with about $54,000 in his pocket for that speech. If I had known he was going to say that I wouldn't have paid 10 grand for this table."
Then when Pure Evil himself, George Bush the Younger unilaterally went into Iraq what did our soldiers discover in his multitudes of palaces?
Boxes and boxes (basically what we would describe in this country as storehouses) of the drugs and other staples the U.N. had been sending to Iraq to help the people with the suffering they were incurring due to the sanctions placed on them designed to bring Saddam to heel.
I will only add as a former marketing person, that saying we are increasing sanctions on Iran sounds good. It does, don't you think? More than sounding good it may even give the people in this country a false sense of security. The folks in Israel though, they don't have any sense of security. Especially since Jimmy Carter's guy last week said if Israel sends in jets to take out Iran's nuclear capabilities (like they did in Iraq back in the '80's) then we must bomb those planes out of the sky...
After sending those planes off to the great blue yonder, maybe we can roll Warren Christopher out of whatever tomb he's in and send him off to Iran. He and Imadinnerjacket can one of those photo opts of planting sunflowers on the nuke silo like Christopher did somewhere during the Clinton years. I think that was my all-time favorite photo opt from those days.
Mrs. P
Hey FLG, forget Carter, Clinton days or even Bush - we've gone back to Nixon -as in: What did the President know and when did he know if?
From Michael Barone :"It is my deeply held belief," Barack Obama told the United Nations General Assembly, that "in the year 2009 -- more than at any point in human history -- the interests of nations and peoples are shared."
"That is, of course, the year Obama became president, and he wasn't shy about referring in his second paragraph to "the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world," though he assured us they "are not about me."
"Before Obama's speech, I wrote that he seems "stuck in a time warp in which the United States is the bad guy." Not any more, he seemed to say in his U.N. speech. He has ordered the closing of Guantanamo. He has prohibited the use of torture. He is "responsibly ending" the war in Iraq (no triumphalist talk of victory). He is promising substantial reductions in U.S. nuclear weapons. He has invested $80 billion in clean energy. The U.S. has joined the United Nations' Human Rights Council.
"All of which is a way of saying that nasty George W. Bush is no longer around with all his self-righteous swagger, and that with (as Obama did not fail to note) the first African-American installed in the White House, America is now on the same page with the rest of the world.
"Much of the speech seemed to be an exercise in what Sigmund Freud called "projection," assuming that others think the way you do. Obama spoke as if the mullahs of Iran, the Kim Jong Il clan of North Korea, Vladimir Putin and his gang of oligarchs, and the rulers of China had the same gripes against the Bush administration as Obama and the liberal Democrats in Congress. Hey, if we just close Gitmo, they'll realize that we're all in sympathy now.
In that spirit, Obama at the General Assembly on Wednesday and while chairing the Security Council on Thursday tread warily on the issue of Iran's nuclear weapons program. "This is not about singling out individual nations," he said Wednesday, before stating that if Iran and North Korea "ignore international standards," they "must be held" -- in unspecified ways -- "accountable." The next day, the Security Council approved a resolution on the subject that did not name either country.
"Yet on Friday, information became public that suggested that Obama's comments on Iran were an example not of Freudian projection but of what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance," refusing to process facts that conflict with deeply held beliefs. The information was that Iran has been operating a second uranium enrichment facility near the holy city of Qom and that it had so informed the International Atomic Energy Agency earlier in the week.
cont'd...
"In response, Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy held a press conference Friday morning before the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh denouncing the Iranians. "Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow," Obama said. "International law is not an empty promise."
"But the Qom facility was not news to Obama. Western intelligence has long known about it, and Obama was briefed on it as president-elect. Even so, there was a sharp contrast between his wary references to Iran on Wednesday and Thursday, and his sharp criticism on Friday. There were probably good reasons -- protecting intelligence sources? -- for not disclosing the information before this week. But shouldn't the president's rhetoric on Wednesday and Thursday have reflected all that he knew?
"Obama has based his policy toward Iran on the hope that its leaders would see the problem as he does -- projection -- and was apparently discounting contrary evidence like the Qom facility -- cognitive dissonance. Perhaps he views himself as, in the words of the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder, "the first president of the nuclear age who grew up with a nuanced view of American power."
Unfortunately, it is clear that even in the year 2009 the interests of nations and peoples are not as unanimously shared as Obama proclaimed Wednesday. Our diplomats and those of five other nations are scheduled to meet with an Iranian counterpart in Geneva on Oct. 1, but the Iranians have indicated they don't want to discuss nuclear weapons issues.
"At a press briefing before the G-20 conference, Brown and Sarkozy threatened Iran with stringent international sanctions; congressional Democrats -- Sen. Evan Bayh and House Foreign Affairs Chairman Howard Berman -- and Sen. Joe Lieberman are pressing for tougher sanctions, too. Is the time over for nuance, projection and cognitive dissonance? "
Mrs. P
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