The delays in the Iranian program are important because they add strategic warning time for the West to respond to any Iranian push for a bomb. U.S. officials [...]]]> Here’s David Ignatius, in The Washington Post, writing about the revised Israeli intelligence estimates about an Iranian bomb (2015, if you must know), with my emphasis:

The delays in the Iranian program are important because they add strategic warning time for the West to respond to any Iranian push for a bomb. U.S. officials estimate that if Iran were to try a “break out” by enriching uranium at Natanz to the 90 percent level needed for a bomb, that move (requiring reconfiguration of the centrifuges) would be detectable – and it would take Iran one to two more years to make a bomb.

The Iranians could try what U.S. officials call a “sneak out” at a secret enrichment facility like the one they constructed near Qom. They would have to use their poorly performing (and perhaps still Stuxnet-infected) old centrifuges or an unproven new model. Alternative enrichment technologies, such as lasers or a heavy-water reactor, don’t appear feasible for Iran now, officials say. Foreign technology from Russia and other suppliers has been halted, and the Iranians can’t build the complex hardware (such as a “pressure vessel” needed for the heavy-water reactor) on their own.

And here’s Eli Lake in the Washington Times, with a good article on the same subject in which he talks with neoconservative pundit Patrick Clawson of WINEP, again with my emphasis:

Patrick Clawson, a specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said: “Certainly, the IAEA reports and what we hear from people knowledgeable about the nuclear program is that Iran is encountering significant technical problems.”

“The great worry is that Iran has clandestine facilities that will allow it to overcome these technical problems,” he said.

Now here’s Columbia professor Richard Bulliet, speaking at a forum called  “War With Iran?”, where the event poster featured a gas mask emblazoned with the Israeli, Iranian, and U.S. flags (video here; start at minute 41):

Recently I was reading about the buildup to the war on Iraq, and one of the things that became apparent as you look back… is that after 1991, the U.S. put sanctions on Iraq that were essentially sanctions that could not be positively satisfied. Iraq could say ‘okay, we have completely given up WMD.’ And we could say, ‘we don’t believe you, and the only way we can be sure is to get rid of your regime.’

My worry is that we’re moving a little bit in this direction with Iran, that we’re creating a focus on a sanctions regime that it may not be possible for Iran to ever satisfy the fear of the people that are putting on the sanctions.

…If you had a statement from Iran that ‘we have stopped purifying uranium,’ you would have some people who would say: ‘Well, underground someplace they’re still doing it; there are hidden facilities. There are centerfuges going day and night, and we just don’t know where they are doing it. They’re in Saddam’s palaces which have now been shipped to Iran.’

And under that circumstance, you get to a logic that’s saying, if you sanction a regime to get it to change its behavior, but you do not believe there are any circumstances under which a claim to behavior change would actually be credible, then regime change is your only option.

How many of the people that campaign most tirelessly for sanctions think that they will work? How many thought they were a good idea in Iraq for a decade, then went ahead and pushed for a war there anyway?

This last point is at the crux of critically examining sanctions–which hurt ordinary Iranians. In Iraq, infant mortality rose from 1 in 30, in 1990, to 1 in 8, in 1997. That’s more than a threefold increase, in just seven years, of babies who did not live to see their first birthdays.

There was no evidence in Iraq of a weapons of mass destructions program. Was it a result of those same sanctions? I couldn’t say. But I do know that neoconservatives and their allies in power remained determined, even with the draconian sanctions, to make war on Iraq.

With Iran seemingly recalcitrant on its nuclear program and the United States unwilling to put up “robust economic, political and strategic incentives that will give Iran’s leaders [...]]]> At the Middle Eastern affairs journal Muftah, Hani Mansourian takes a well warranted critical look into the human cost of sanctions against Iran.

With Iran seemingly recalcitrant on its nuclear program and the United States unwilling to put up “robust economic, political and strategic incentives that will give Iran’s leaders reason to cooperate,” many proponents of escalating measure hold out hope that the people of Iran to rise up and oust their regime due to ever tightening sanctions and perhaps even an eventual military attack.

While a regime change as a result of military attack is regularly dismissed by people in the know — just ask top Iranian activists what they think — far less attention is given to the viability of tough sanctions leading to a mass uprising.

Remember that the U.S. State Department has admitted its sanctions have expanded to pressuring ordinary Iranians — Jamshid Average, if you will — thus conflating the people with the government of Iran.

Mansourian examines precedents — focusing on the failures of broad-based sanctions against Iraq and targeted ones against Zimbabwe — and contrasts these with the situation in Iran. He shows that even the targeted sanctions will prove counterproductive, because they are crushing Iran’s fragile economy and thereby destroying the middle class that drives the Iranian opposition.

Mansourian writes:

Many years of sanctions coupled with sub-optimal economic policies in Iran has resulted in a weak economy and a fragile middle-class. The latest round of UN, U.S., and EU sanctions on Iran is likely to drive millions into poverty and destitution. As economic opportunities for the growth of a solid middle-class disappear, the young Iranians that have historically been the agents of change in the country will lose their social base.  Ironically, then, sanctions may do more to increase the power of the Iranian government and to weaken the domestic opposition movement, to the ostensible detriment of U.S. interests

The Iraq example is especially compelling. In the 1996, Secretary of State Madeline Albright notoriously told a CBS reporter that sanctions were “worth it,” even though a half a million dead Iraqi children had died. Iraq’s infant mortality rose from one in 30 in 1990 to 1 in 8 in 1997. “Worth what?” one might ask, considering that as far as the hawks were concerned Iraq still needed to be invaded.

Note that Mansouraian’s analysis takes for granted the questionable notion, put forward by sanctions-hawks that the Green Movement is anywhere united behind regime change rather than incremental reform.

But sanctions as a means to regime change isn’t the only goal based on questionable premises. Even the notion of sanctions as a means to change Iranian behavior on the nuclear program is unlikely to succeed.

At a conference called “War With Iran?” last month at Columbia University, Prof. Richard Bulliet expressed fear that the U.S. Iran policy may be heading down the same path as Iraq policy — implementing a sanctions regime that can never work, followed by a military attack (video):

After 1991, the U.S. put sanctions on Iraq that could not possibly be satisfied. Iraq could say, ‘Okay, we have completely given up WMD.’ And we would say, ‘We don’t believe you. And the only way we can be sure is to get rid of your regime’ … My worry is that we’re moving a little bit in this direction with Iran, that we are creating a focus on a sanctions regime that it may not be possible for Iran to satisfy the fears of the people who are putting on the sanctions.

Give a read to Andrew Cockburn’s essay on the impact of sanctions on Iraq in July’s London Review of Books. The developments with regards to Iran may well seem eerily similar.

Bulliet was in Israel evaluating the country’s Middle [...]]]> Columbia history professor Richard Bulliet spent three weeks in Israel last spring, he told a packed room at an ominously named event — “War With Iran?” — hosted by the university’s Middle East Institute. “Iran was always coming up as an ‘existential threat,’” he said.

Bulliet was in Israel evaluating the country’s Middle East programs. He  seemed disconcerted by what he found: There was very little study of this so-called “existential threat.” The designation was not backed by any rigorous academic examination of the country on the receiving end of the accusation.

“To my recollection,” he said, “there were five professors in Israel who were… specialists on Iran.”

Five is an awfully low number for a country with a robust university system that churns out research and, more importantly, whose work informs its (as well as, occasionally, the U.S.’s) policy structures, something Bulliet acknowledged.

“I have a very low regard for the quality of inputs that go into [policy thinking in Israel],” he said.

One of the five professors is Haggai Ram of Ben Gurion University. Ram published a book last year called Iranophobia: The Logic of and Israeli Obsession, which looked at Israeli assumptions about Iran (and vice versa) and how they were both products of and reflected in society.

While he didn’t name any others, he did note that not one of the five mirrored the prevailing national Israeli dialogue about the Islamic Republic: “Not a single one of them was a hawk on Iran.”

I’m not one to usually quote spiritual leaders, but given this situation — amid speculation that Israel is leaning toward attacking Iran — this tidbit from the Dalai Lama seems particularly apt: “Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of real peace.”