Are Sanctions on Iran ‘Effective’?

There are at least two ways to evaluate the US’s policy of sweeping economic sanctions on Iran. The first is to take the stated aim of the sanctions – what US officials claim is their purpose – and assess their efficacy. In this case, US officials claim the purpose of the sanctions is to inflict so much economic pain that the Iranian government is pressured to make major concessions on their nuclear program.

The International Crisis Group (ICG) has just written a paper assessing the efficacy of the sanctions on their own terms. “Without doubt, they are crippling Iran’s economy,” the paper finds. “But are they succeeding” in pressuring Iran to concede to US demands on its nuclear program? “[P]lainly they are not.”

Instead of serving as a means to an end, the ICG paper concludes, the sanctions approach has become an end in itself, because “in the absence of any visible shift in Tehran’s political calculus, it is difficult to measure their impact through any metric other than the quantity and severity of the sanctions themselves.”

One “unintended consequence” of just relentlessly imposing harsh economic warfare without trying to incentivize Iran towards a political settlement is that it further persuades Iranian leaders that “the goal is regime change.” The strategy holds a “considerable risk,” the paper concludes, “that by placing all one’s eggs in the sanctions basket, failure may appear to leave no other option but war.”

Here we are brought to the second way to evaluate the sanctions on Iran: assessing their effectiveness according to their actual aims instead of the stated aims.

If we evaluate it this way, the mystery of why Washington continues down this dead end road evaporates. That is to say, the sanctions are incredibly effective at blocking any diplomatic opening with Iran and relegating the potential policy options down to two: (1) more sanctions, or (2) war.

In their recent Foreign Affairs article, Rolf Ekéus, who was Executive Chairman of the UN Special Commission on Iraq from 1991 to 1997, and Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer of Stanford University, write explicitly that the sanctions have “the long-term objective of regime change,” as opposed to a diplomatic settlement.

Their case study is Iraq. Back in the 1990s, when the US-led sanctions regime in Iraq was killing millions of innocent people, Saddam’s regime eventually met UN Security Council requirements to get the sanctions lifted, but the US refused to provide any sanctions relief.

“In the spring of 1997,” the authors write, “former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave a speech at Georgetown University in which she stated that even if the weapons provisions under the cease-fire resolution were completed, the United States would not agree to lifting sanctions unless Saddam had been removed from power.”

It’s hard to see the Obama administration’s approach as any different. As I’ve written, Washington doesn’t appear to be interested in diplomacy. Dominance is what they want. They want to weaken the Iranian regime. And judging by that criteria, sanctions are incredibly effective.

Old Cartoon Captures Antiwar.Com Mission

This 1965 New Yorker cartoon – from the dawn of the era of Vietnam War protests – captures the danger of leaving peace to the experts.

cartoon New Yorker 1965 Pentagon complains leave peace to experts

Daniel Ellsberg was inspired by some of those anti-war protests. I did a piece for the Future of Freedom Foundation in 2008 on Ellsberg’s memoir:

ELLSBERG’S LESSONS FOR OUR TIME

by James Bovard

Daniel Ellsberg is the kind of American who should receive a Medal of Freedom. Except that the Medals of Freedom are distributed by presidents who routinely give them to “useful idiots” and apologists for their wars and power grabs. It should be renamed the Medal for Enabling or Applauding Official Crimes in the Name of Freedom.

Ellsberg knowingly risked spending a life in prison to bring the truth about the Vietnam War to Americans. He had hoped truth would set Americans free from the spell of official lies. But the experience in Iraq indicates that Americans have learned little if anything from the Vietnam-era deceits.

Flora Lewis, a New York Times columnist, writing three weeks before 9/11, commented in a review of a book on U.S. government lies on the Vietnam War, “There will probably never be a return to the discretion, really collusion, with which the media used to treat presidents, and it is just as well.” But within months of her comment, the media had proven itself as craven as ever.

The following year, Ellsberg’s book — Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers — came out. I should have read this book before writing the “Lying and Legitimacy” chapter in Attention Deficit Democracy. Ellsberg’s bitter experiences would have curbed my youthful idealism. His book hit the streets at a time when Americans were still inclined to see Bush through a 9/11 holy haze. His lies on Iraq were not widely recognized until after Baghdad had fallen and the WMDs failed to materialize.

Ellsberg tells the story of how, as a former Marine lieutenant with a doctorate from Harvard, he was hired by John McNaughton, the assistant secretary of defense, and started work in August 1964 on the day the Gulf of Tonkin crisis ignited. He relates receiving the “flash” wire dispatches from the USS Maddox.

Within hours after the U.S. destroyer reported being attacked by North Vietnamese PT boats, the ship’s commander had wired Washington that the reports of an attack on his ship may have been wildly exaggerated: “Entire action leaves many doubts.”

But it didn’t matter, because this was just the pretext that Lyndon Johnson was looking for. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara raced to proclaim that the attack was unprovoked. But at a National Security Council meeting on the evening that the first report came in, Johnson asked, “Do they want war by attacking our ships in the middle of the Gulf of Tonkin?” CIA chief John McCone answered, “No. The North Vietnamese are reacting defensively to our attack on their off-shore islands. They are responding out of pride and on the basis of defense considerations.”

The fact was that the United States had orchestrated an attack by South Vietnamese commandos on North Vietnamese territory before the alleged conflict began. But Johnson lied and commenced bombing, and Congress rushed to cheer him on.

In Vietnam, as in Iraq, the U.S. government pushed hard to get an election to sanctify its puppet regime. Ellsberg, who spent two years in Vietnam after his time in the Pentagon, aided some of the key U.S. officials in this effort who sought an honest vote. But when U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge heard their pitch, he replied, “You’ve got a gentleman in the White House right now [Johnson] who has spent most of his life rigging elections. I’ve spent most of my life rigging elections. I spent nine whole months rigging a Republican convention to choose Ike as a candidate rather than Bob Taft.” Lodge later ordered, “Get it across to the press that they shouldn’t apply higher standards here in Vietnam than they do in the U.S.”

But Lodge’s comments were downright uplifting compared with a meeting that Ellsberg attended with former Vice President Richard Nixon, who was visiting Vietnam on a “fact-finding mission” to help bolster his presidential aspirations. Former CIA operative Edward Lansdale told Nixon that he and his colleagues wanted to help “make this the most honest election that’s ever been held in Vietnam.” Nixon replied, “Oh, sure, honest, yes, honest, that’s right … so long as you win!” With the last words he did three things in quick succession: winked, drove his elbow hard into Lansdale’s arm, and slapped his own knee.

It’s hard to imagine any U.S. government official even suggesting to Bush, in his fly-bys at Camp Cupcake in Iraq, that the United States should make sure that the Iraqi elections were fair and square.

Ellsberg’s memoirs vividly explain how top officials are corrupted by possession of what they consider to be top-secret information. Ellsberg warned Henry Kissinger shortly after Nixon’s 1968 election victory that having access to classified information is “something like the potion Circe gave to the wanderers and shipwrecked men who happened on her island, which turned them into swine.”

This is the one message of the book that no longer seems relevant, since there haven’t been any swine in the White House or Pentagon for a long time.

The Pentagon Papers

In 1967, the Pentagon ordered top experts to analyze where the war had gone wrong. The resulting study contained 47 volumes of material exposing the intellectual and political follies that had, by that time, already left tens of thousands of Americans dead. After the study was finished, it was distributed to the key players and federal agencies. However, the massive study was completely ignored. At the time the New York Times began publishing excerpts in 1971, “the White House and the State Department were unable even to locate the 47 volumes.” New York Times editor Tom Wicker commented at the time that “the people who read these documents in the Times were the first to study them.”

Ellsberg helped write a portion of the papers dealing with the Kennedy administration. He was struck by the incorrigibility of U.S. policy. No matter how many Ivy League grads and whiz kids were at the helm, “There was a general failure to study history or to analyze or even to record operational experience, especially mistakes. Above all, effective pressures for optimistically false reporting at every level, for describing “progress” rather than problems or failure, concealed the very need for change in approach or for learning.”

The same failures permeate the U.S. military’s experience in Iraq. The Pentagon and White House have concocted one bogus standard after another to sanctify whatever recent policy change they announced.

Ellsberg was a gung-ho liberal Cold Warrior until the late 1960s. As he read the confidential documents that formed the basis of the Pentagon Papers, he realized that he had greatly underestimated the amount of perennial presidential deceit in America. He grasped that

the concentration of power within the executive branch since World War II had focused nearly all responsibility for policy “failure” upon one man, the president. At the same time, it gave him enormous capability to avert or postpone or conceal such personal failure by means of force or fraud. Confronted by resolute external resistance, as in Vietnam, that power could not fail to corrupt the human who held it.

Ellsberg became active with anti-war demonstrators and has great anecdotes of idiot cops at D.C. protests. The motto of the 1971 May Day anti-war protests was “If they won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.” This is an ideal that should not be forgotten by those in our time who have wearied of surge and postsurge nonsense.

Publishing the Papers

I was surprised to learn how hard Ellsberg had to struggle to find anyone with the gumption to go public with the 7,000 pages. Sen. George McGovern at first was interested but ducked out on putting the Papers in the Congressional Record, as did Sen. William Fulbright. On the other hand, Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska had no fear and pulled out all the stops to get the information out.

The New York Times’s publication of the Pentagon Papers was the big breakthrough. Nixon’s Justice Department raced to get an injunction blocking publication, and later did the same when the Washington Post began publishing material Ellsberg sent it. Ellsberg responded by sending chunks of his report to newspapers around the country. The Nixon administration’s rage and machinations were the best PR the Pentagon Papers could have received.

Nixon henchman H.R. Haldeman said to Nixon on the day the Papers first hit the New York Times that the result would be that “the ordinary guy” comes to believe that “you can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say; and you can’t rely on their judgement. And the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this.”

Unfortunately, Haldeman’s fear was not borne out. Ellsberg was disappointed at the response to the Pentagon Papers: “There remained enormous resistance in the minds of voters and commentators to believing that these generalizations applied to an incumbent president.” This has been a perennial pitfall for American democracy: assuming that the most recently elected politician is an entirely different species from all the rascals who preceded him. It was especially ironic that so many Americans were so slow to recognize Nixon’s treachery.

At the start of his trial for leaking the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg declared, “This has been for me an act of hope and of trust. Hope that the truth will free us of this war. Trust that informed Americans will direct their public servants to stop lying and to stop the killing and dying by Americans in Indochina.”

This was the type of idealism that spurred Henry Kissinger to label Ellsberg “the most dangerous man in America.”

In the new century, Ellsberg has continued speaking out, condemning official lies, and appealing to Americans to recognize that wars are far bloodier and more costly than leaders claim. In July 2006, he warned that if the United States attacks Iran, “I have no doubt that there will be, the day after or within days an equivalent of a Reichstag fire decree that will involve massive detentions in this country.” He has publicly urged other Pentagon and administration insiders to take the risk to leak key documents in order to serve truth instead of the current regime.

Unfortunately, even when government officials risk their freedom and careers to leak information, the media sometimes refuse to publish it — or they bury it until after an election — as the New York Times did with its information on Bush’s illegal warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ phone calls.

Who knows how many other leaks have never seen the light of day because of a media that kowtowed to President Bush and Vice President Cheney as if they were gods?

www.jimbovard.com On Twitter – @jimbovard

Convenient “Clerical Error” Gives Rosy Picture of Afghan Progress

Let’s hope that newly minted Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will live up to some of our expectations and not be afraid to tell it like it is. Let’s start with Afghanistan. We just found out today that an alleged data entry glitch in the Pentagon program that spits out regular assessments like the number of Taliban attacks on our forces prompted the Department of Defense to issue too-rosy proclamations on the progress of the war there.

New Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel
New Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel

From Robert Burns at The Associated Press on Tuesday:

The American-led military coalition in Afghanistan backed off Tuesday from its claim that Taliban attacks dropped off in 2012, tacitly acknowledging a hole in its widely repeated argument that violence is easing and that the insurgency is in steep decline.

In response to Associated Press inquiries about its latest series of statistics on security in Afghanistan, the coalition command in Kabul said it had erred in reporting a 7 percent decline in attacks. In fact there was no decline at all, officials said.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who is among the senior officials who had publicly repeated the assertion of an encouraging drop-off in Taliban attacks last year, was disturbed to learn of the error, said his spokesman, George Little.

“This particular set of metrics doesn’t tell the full story of progress against the Taliban, of course, but it’s unhelpful to have inaccurate information in our systems,” Little said.

I hate to be cheeky, but why start now? The Pentagon and the war’s top commanding officers have been quite up front all along that winning the hearts and minds of the domestic audience was just as important — if not more important (in order to keep the money and the recruitment flowing) — than its PR successes with the Afghan people. At its peak in the year 2009,  for example, the military was spending upwards of $4.7 billion a year on “strategic communications, ” which included $1.6 billion for  recruitment and $547 million for public affairs at home. The military planners meant business.

With that kind of investment in “good news” it was no surprise over the years to hear generals completely buff and polish the truth about troop casualties and our tactical successes against the enemy. Especially in Afghanistan. There was always a silver lining or some sort of perfume to mist over what were clearly underwhelming statistics, if not bad news altogether. The worst was when nearly three years ago, Gen. David “Surge!” Petraeus, then commander of U.S and ISAF forces in Afghanistan, actually tried to tell congress that the use of IEDs by the Taliban against U.S forces  had “flattened,” when really it was the worst year for our troops in terms of blast injuries,ever. From Gareth Porter in September 2010:

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published Tuesday, Petraeus asserted that the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) by the Taliban had “flattened” over the past year and attributed that alleged success to pressures by the U.S. military, and especially the increased tempo of Special Operations Forces raids against Taliban units.

Data provided by the Pentagon’s Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), however, shows that IEDs planted by Afghan insurgents killed nearly 40 percent more U.S. and NATO troops in the first eight months of 2010 than in the comparable period of 2009.

The data also show that Taliban IEDs wounded 2,025 U.S. and NATO troops in the first eight months of this year – almost twice the 1,035 wounded in the same months last year.

In the Journal interview, Petraeus said that the data on violent incidents in Afghanistan indicate a slowly improving security situation.

Almost a year later, I juxtaposed Petraeus’s rosy picture (he left his command for the CIA in the summer of 2011) and chronicled on these pages some the year’s worst IED stories:

According to the most recent data, there was a 120 percent rise in wounded soldiers undergoing amputations from 2009 to 2010 (75 cases to 171 cases, the steepest increase being in the last four months of the year). There was also a dramatic hike in soldiers suffering amputations of more than one limb and genital injuries, and an overall increase — 40 percent — in IED fatalities year-over-year.

As of Aug. 1, there were 158 IED-related coalition deaths (the vast majority American) in 2011, according to data posted at iCasualties. There were 368 such fatalities in 2010.

Walter Reed Hospital 2011 credit: AP
Walter Reed Hospital 2011 credit: AP

A year after that, I demanded the military “tell the truth already” about the newest “signature wound,” the “dismounted complex blast injury” that was rendering U.S and coalition troops not only legless but childless for life. At the same time, Afghan soldiers were being accused of killing coalition troops in increasing numbers of “green on blue” attacks. Then-Ambassador Ryan Crocker (he too, has since jumped ship) and now outgoing Gen. John Allen, did the rounds on television to assure everyone that things were running smoothly. “I think we have made tremendous progress,” Crocker told the BBC at the time.

Fast forward to December 2012, the Pentagon gives the 7 percent “decline in attacks” figure we now know was “flawed” to Congress in their mandated report of the war’s progress. Not sure if that will be changed now. Also in December, according to the AP, Panetta was telling reporters that “violence is down” for 2012, and Afghan forces “have gotten much better at providing security” in areas where they have taken the lead. “Overall,” he added, the Taliban “are losing.”

That narrative was carried over into last week’s UN report that civilian casualties are down year over year in Afghanistan. But, again, no surprise, the UN’s findings were actually a mixed bag: violence against women was up, as were attacks on civilians by “anti-government forces,” and U.S drone strikes had increased, too — from 243 in 2009 to 494 in 2012. That means more civilians killed by drone: 6 civilians killed and three wounded in five incidents, up from just one incident in 2011, according to the AP.

While the spin has largely been unsuccessful – most people believe the war was a waste, and we don’t hear much confidence that the government there is going to hold it together when we’re gone — but it hasn’t been helpful, either. It has blurred our vision, placated our fears and white-washed bad news for far too long.

Let’s hope that Hagel won’t feel the need to prettify the obvious. He should know better, more than most, that burying the lessons of the past merely damn us to repeating them in the future.

Kazakhstan, a human rights disaster, hosts Iran Talks

Allen Ruff and I have written extensively about Kazakhstan and about the typical hypocrisy at-play in the kleptocratic country. We published an article in the aftermath of the Zhanaozen Massacre about the U.S. imperial Great Game being played in Kazakhstan and Central Asia at-large, then followed that up with an article about the nuclear double-standards, juxtaposing how the U.S. treats Iran vs. how it treats Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan, as we pointed out, provides 30-percent+ of the world’s supply of uranium fuel stock.

Next came our three-part series on the World Bank’s “knowledge bank” agenda in Kazakhstan, bringing Nazarbayev University, named after its “President-for-Life,” to Astana.

Today, Allen was on The Real News Network to chat about the nuclear summit dog-and-pony show and why it’s being hosted in Kazakhstan. Check it out below.

Sophisticated American Statecraft: Making Poor, Sick Iranian Civilians Suffer

From the beginning of the Obama administration’s savage economic sanctions on Iran, Antiwar.com has been highlighting the humanitarian costs of such policies. The sanctions are not only undermining the Iranian economy in the form of high unemployment, inflation, etc. They are also blocking the import of vital medicines for millions of sick Iranians who desperately need treatment for conditions like cancer, hemophilia, multiple sclerosis, and others.

This is the sophisticated tool Washington has employed to “solve” the (invented) Iranian problem: making impoverished, sick civilians suffer.

If you can bear it, disregard the extreme war propaganda at the beginning of this ABC News clip and see the faces of Iranians at the pharmacy being told they can’t medicate their cancer-stricken loved ones.

Amazingly, this joke of a journalist places the blame on Iran’s Supreme Leader. He made his way all the way over to Tehran and managed to report the exact opposite of the truth, that Iranians are suffering because of their own government’s intransigence on the nuclear issue. That –  quite clearly – is simply untrue.