eastafrodite:

• Republican Senator of Illinois, Mark Kirk stated “the goal of the sanctions should explicitly be to ‘take the food out of the mouths of the [Iranian] citizens”.

• Democratic Senator of California Brad Sherman stated “Critics of sanctions argue that these measures will hurt the Iranian people. Quite frankly, we need to do just that”.

It’s nice that these supposedly dichotomous parties have the same exact agenda when it comes to hurting brown people on the opposite side of the world.

Americans, you need to remember. Unless you’re talking about yourself and your needs and your interests and your safety and your well being and policies that affect you and you only, there is so such thing as “the lesser of two evils”.

I am massaging the bridge of my nose and grasping my hair with the effort to understand why anyone thinks this will work. 

Sometimes sanctions placing economic pressure on countries makes a difference. Sometimes it really doesn’t. In Iran’s case, they already had an attempt at revolution in the “Green Revolution.” Remember that? They were also trying to tweet and get attention and weren’t as successful as Egypt. Which shows how it can happen and fail. 

So given that popular protest is probably unlikely to topple the regime in Iran anytime soon, how is economically strangling ordinary people going to change Iran’s stance on nuclear energy development, exactly? 

Man these people don’t think rationally. Ever. It’s much more likely to foster resentment against the outside, which keeps threatening them, cutting off their food, and letting Israel threaten war. 

This is all besides the lack of facts that Iran is trying to develop the bomb, or that Iran is as much of a security threat as they say it is even without the bomb. It is not a particularly angelic country by any means, but I really wish Obama had stuck to his idea of open outreach.