Iran sanctions now causing food insecurity, mass suffering
Yet again, the US and its allies spread mass human misery though a policy that is as morally indefensible as it is counter-productive
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/07/iran-santions-suffering
Since us Americans, as a species, tend to be totally unaware of what is going on outside of our country, I will do my small (tiny) part in attempting to expose my reader(s) to what is going on in our names. The whole article (as usual; I like Glenn and how he writes) is interesting and a good read, but since I know many of my reader(s) won’t take the time to look at it, I excerpted a few bits. This first is actually a quote within a quote:
“As documented by the report’s firsthand account on the ground, sanctions are not driving the working class to join Iran’s democracy movement, they are doing the opposite – decimating the Iranian middle class [btw, any of this sound a wee bit familiar?], that has been at the center of the democracy movement, by intensifying their economic struggles. The greatest impediment for Iran’s pro-democracy movement – as we saw at the height of the Green Movement protests in 2009 – has been that working class Iranians who are preoccupied with immediate financial struggles are unable to enlist in a struggle for political freedoms.”
This second bit is part of what prompted me to post in my blog…
What’s most extraordinary about all of this is that the extreme human suffering caused by US-led sanctions is barely acknowledged in mainstream American political discourse. One reason that Americans were so baffled after the 9/11 attack (why do they hate us?) is the same reason they continue to be so baffled by anti-American protests in the Muslim world (what are they so angry about?): namely, most Americans literally have no idea, because nobody ever told them, that their government’s imposition of sanctions in Iraq led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, and they similarly have no idea that the suffering of ordinary Iranians is becoming increasingly substantial.
People in the Muslim world (who are relentlessly depicted as propagandized) are well aware of the human devastation US sanctions have caused, while Americans (who think of themselves as the beneficiaries of a free and vibrant press) have largely had those facts kept from them. That dynamic in part, is what often explains the irreconcilable worldviews among people in those two parts of the world.
Can any student of history, particularly the history of the US, doubt that war with Iran is not only inevitable, but at most a few years away? Lessons learned from Iraq? Well, by the voting public, nada. By the people who lead the sheeple around by their nose, not much either except that they should invest an extra 10 minutes and invent more plausible lies as justification for war.
Does anyone think that if Iran were to immediately, publicly and verifiably disavow their nuclear ambitions that we wouldn’t go to war with them? The only ‘crime’ that Saddam Husein committed when he destroyed his WMDs was to expect that the US would make public the spy satellite images of him doing the destroying. By not making it public he gave the US (and Israeli) hawks all they needed to deny that the WMDs had been destroyed and create the whole massive propaganda in the run up to the war.
US govt == terrorist organization. Your tax dollars at work!
