Hey you all, Scott Horton here.
I just wanted to say thank you so much on behalf of myself, as well as Sheldon Richman, Pete Quinonez, Kyle Anzalone, Keith Knight, Tommy Salmons, Patrick Farlane, and all our great writers, and everybody at the Libertarian Institute for the great success of our fun drive.
I thought we'd do okay, but you guys really came through for us, and that means that we can continue doing what we do for you guys.
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All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Brian McGlinchey, and you guys know him from 28pages.org, and from his great work about the Saudis duping American soldiers into protesting against the law that makes it legal for Americans to sue the Saudis for helping bankroll Al-Qaeda.
Now, he's at starkrealities.substack.com.
Welcome back to the show, Brian.
How are you doing?
Great to be with you, Scott.
I really love this article.
It's called Advocates of Economic Sanctions Mirror the Morality of Al-Qaeda.
I saw one friend on Twitter said, I learned it from you, Dad, all right?
I learned it from watching you.
I guess the real question is, oh, for those of you younger than Generation X, that was an old drug war ad.
Anyway, yeah, so the Mujahideen and the Americans, a bit of a mirror image transmission belt of violence and power and morality, you say, huh?
Absolutely, and really what this article is trying to do is take a step back.
I think a lot of times people get lost in the diplomacy and the chess game between countries and so forth.
I think for a lot of people, they think of economic sanctions as a more humane alternative to war, like, oh, I don't want to go to war, but I'd support sanctions instead.
What this article seeks to do is just take that step back, take the full perspective, and really crystallize economic sanctions down to a principled level.
When we do that, we find that if you describe them generally, you could just say that economic sanctions intentionally inflict suffering on civilian populations to force a change in their government's policies.
That's what they're doing.
Sounds pretty familiar.
I almost didn't believe this.
I remember me and Will Grigg had fun with this at the time.
I get people challenging me, where'd you get this quote?
What is this?
It's Bill Clinton at foreignpolicy.com being interviewed by them.
He says, terror is killing and robbery and coercion by people who do not have state authority.
That's the difference.
I think that quote's on one of your pages in your Enough Already book, I believe.
Isn't that one prominently placed there?
Yeah.
That's a striking quote.
He means it.
That's exactly what it is.
In fact, a lot of the times people use the word terrorism so broadly to mean any kind of violence by any non-state actor in any circumstance, especially if it's somebody they don't like, the side they're not on, and even things that aren't even violent at all.
The specific definition there of using violence against civilians, in other words, innocent third-party bystanders, in order to provoke a political reaction, that's exactly what Al-Qaeda, for example, does.
That is, in fact, exactly what the United States of America does all day long.
The only difference is they have state authority.
Exactly.
I was researching various definitions of terrorism.
If you start looking to the US government's definition, and there's actually several of them depending on the agency, but typically they'll start with the word unlawful.
The unlawful use of violence against civilians.
Kind of echoing Clinton and preserving that right to use violence against civilians when it's quote-unquote lawful.
Exactly.
Now, here's the thing of it though.
What's sanctions anyway?
I don't know.
Exactly.
A lot of people probably just get stuck on the euphemism.
It means obviously economic punishment of somebody at some point, but it sounds a lot less severe than a siege.
Of course, because of the international law, we don't have to literally lay siege.
They just have to threaten to use their treasury department.
They can terrorize any country or any business in the world into not doing business with who they say not to do business with.
Embargo, I guess, sounds a little harsher than sanctions.
Siege sounds like, oh, I get it.
You're starving a civilian population to death deliberately, but it gets buried under jargon, as George Carlin says.
The pain is also then buried.
Exactly.
In an earlier time, to inflict the suffering on Iran that's currently being inflicted, you'd be mining the harbors of Iran.
Well, now, all you really need is the Department of the Treasury and the Office of Foreign Assets Control pushing their buttons and instituting those rules and implementing them to basically cut off a country economically without firing a shot.
All right, so give us some examples of how this works, because, jeez, it sounds like you're accusing the USA of acting immorally, but that can't be right because of the colors of the flag and stuff like that.
Also, my grandpa was in World War II.
Yeah, in effect, the way—well, first of all, we talked about economic sanctions.
We're talking about things that are inhibiting the flow of goods into Iran and out of Iran, so basically talking about trade in both directions.
Now, the U.S. government and defenders of the sanctions will always point out the fact that there are exceptions.
Hey, there are exceptions for humanitarian goods or for medical goods or for food.
Those exceptions end up being meaningless, though, because the scope of the restrictions that are imposed on Iranian banking, on the flow of Iranian currency, these end up inhibiting transactions.
So even if you theoretically are allowed to buy food or medicine, what you end up running into is these economic roadblocks that make it unworkable.
You also have something called overcompliance.
Hey, this is where foreign companies, countries are so wary of running afoul of the United States government and the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, that they simply just back away.
Hey, I'm not going to invest the energy to try to ensure I'm in full compliance.
I'm just going to back away.
The risk-reward is not there.
I'm just going to not do business with them.
So again, we're talking in abstract terms, but if you start looking at real-life examples of the impact, there are periodically reports on this in the U.S. media.
Not enough, but there are sometimes.
For example, a 2019 L.A. Times story with this headline, middle-class Iranians resort to buying rotting produce as U.S. sanctions take toll.
So this is a real-life impact.
It's not, as many might think, oh, economic sanctions, wow, earnings are going to be down slightly in Iran, or their GDP is going to take a slight hit.
We're talking about real-life impacts on people.
That article also gave the example of a single mother who, due to skyrocketing prices, had to leave her apartment behind and move into her mother's one-bedroom dwelling because inflation is another major impact and effect of the sanctions regime.
In addition to that, there's a lot of examples in the medical field.
A Human Rights Watch report in 2019 found patients with rare diseases weren't able to get the medicines they need.
They found a pediatric cancer treatment center unable to get the right medications.
I think the worst example that I came across, this kind of exasperated me when I read it, was that Iranians were finding it hard to import eye drops.
The report said, causing suffering for a large number of patients affected by chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War.
As you well know, Scott, the United States aided and abetted the chemical weapons attacks that inflicted those people to begin with.
Let me talk about a stark reality.
We helped provide targeting information to the Iraqi military at the time.
It was reported that was done with full knowledge that Iraq would be attacking them with chemical weapons.
We facilitated it back then, and then we denied them the ability to ease their symptoms all these many years later.
I hope you like the book.
Time to End the War in Afghanistan, as well as Brand New Out Inside Syria by our friend Reese Ehrlich, and a lot of other great books, mostly by libertarians there.
Reese might be one exception, but essentially they're all libertarian audiobooks.
And here's how you can get a lifetime subscription to listen and think audiobooks.
Just donate $100 to the Scott Horton Show at scotthorton.org slash donate.
Um, and you know, such an important point that you're making there about the over-compliance, where you think about a group of billionaire investors in some massive conglomerate, some global corporation that owns giant shipping services, you know, ocean liners full of containers.
These are huge investments.
And you want to mess with the U.S. Treasury?
You want to get anywhere near having the U.S. Treasury even interested in what our company is up to?
You're fired.
Right?
Like, we're just going to sail around Iran.
Screw them.
Sorry.
You know, even if we like Iranians, we're just going to have to sell to somebody else because we don't want to get anywhere near the U.S. Treasury, which is probably the most powerful terrorist organization in the world.
And so, and I don't just mean the ATF.
They're under the Department of Justice now.
Yeah, I mean, you're right.
And that's, you know, in your example, you talk about a very, very large corporation that might have the resources to, you know, a giant general counsel staff to study the law and maybe navigate it correctly.
But then picture two smaller companies that might have good intentions, but just they can't muster the legal.
Or even if you have the lawyers, I mean, those same lawyers are going to say, listen, we can navigate you around the letter of the law.
OK, but we can't navigate you around the attentions of the U.S. Treasury Department if they decide to be interested in what you're doing.
And so that's at this level, there's no such thing as law.
It's all about politics and power.
And so the Americans want to nail your company to the wall.
You have to be guilty of anything and just investigate you for as long as it takes to ruin your, you know, whatever they want to do.
So, I mean, I'm not advocating this.
I'm just trying to get people to understand because the Americans will say, look, we put sanctions on medicine.
We didn't ban imports of medicine.
But yeah, you did.
You just didn't call it that.
That's the difference.
That's right.
That's the effect.
And like all government policies, they can't be judged by their intention or their stated intention.
They have to be judged by the results.
And the result here is denying men, women and children, individual human beings like us who have no control over Iran's nuclear energy program or its negotiations with foreign powers on that, denying those people medicine, causing their businesses to suffer, causing unemployment, causing a whole host of sources of misery in their individual lives for something they have nothing to do with personally.
Yeah.
All right.
So listen, you said something so important there about inflation.
And, you know, this is how you wipe out independent power, right?
You destroy their savings by inflating the currency.
And that's why communists like it so much is because you don't have to kill all the kulaks.
You just bankrupt them all.
This kind of thing.
And so that's what we're doing.
We're helping the regime that supposedly is the target of the sanctions consolidate their power by bankrupting any kind of independent centers of wealth and influence in the country, making it so that only those most connected to the state can survive.
Yeah, it's just another example of how we're talking here about the morality of sanctions.
But then that's just another example of all the other unintended consequences of sanctions that end up countering your stated objective.
If it's to weaken the regime and so forth.
Really, what you end up doing is putting a lot of dynamics in play that end up benefiting the regime.
Right.
When resources become scarce.
Well, who controls the resources becomes then more powerful.
Right.
And who could possibly smuggle out quantities of oil under, you know, black market cover.
Other than the IRGC.
Right.
Other than the most powerful, corrupt forces, no one else could possibly, you know, mount an effort to get away with, you know, filling a boat, a gigantic ship with oil and sending it off somewhere or, you know, smuggling it by trucks and pipelines and directions that the Americans can't prevent something like that.
It'd have to be only those closest to the regime.
And that's not just hypothetical, you know, praxeology or whatever.
Look at Mohammed Sahimi's great journalism from the era of Obama's crippling sanctions, where he demonstrated this in detail.
Yeah.
I mean, recently I saw where Iran was itself, you know, enforcing, tracking down people smuggling oil out of Iran.
So, I mean, because they weren't the right people smuggling it, apparently.
Of course.
Yeah, they're just protecting their turf.
And, you know, whereas if it's open season, open market as best as possible, then at least, you know, whatever restrictions there are about entering the oil market in Iran are their own problem and not a situation that we've created.
But you can certainly see the opposite of that under the blockade regime.
And so, but here's the other thing, too, though.
Let's go back to the 1990s and getting into this mess in the first place.
Dual containment of Iraq and Iran from bases in Saudi Arabia in order to enforce the blockades, in order to enforce these sanctions, and then, of course, to enforce the no-fly zone, supposedly, as though Saddam was trying to fly over northern and southern Iraq through, you know, the last two years of H.W. Bush and through all eight years of Bill Clinton and, in fact, the first year, year and a half of W. Bush before the invasion.
More importantly, all those years between 1991 and 2001 when we were attacked by Saudi dissidents and raged over this exact policy.
Right.
And this whole sanctions regime is one of one of the bin Laden's cited grievances was, you know, specifically, he looked at the effects on the children of Iraq by that round of sanctions.
You know, it feeds this cycle and feeds this endless treadmill that we call the war on terror.
Yeah.
Boy, what could have been, huh?
Right now, there's this 2019 report by Human Rights Watch, which, you know, half the time they're advocating for regime change.
So, you never know.
But in this case, they're complaining about the effects of these sanctions on the Iranian civilian population.
Correct?
That's exactly right.
And so what do they find in there?
Yeah, they found, you know, many impacts and particularly in the medical realm.
Just to give one one more vivid example, they talk about patients with a certain rare disease that causes blistering.
And they were receiving a special kind of foam dressing from a European company.
But that company decided, hey, we're just not going to do business in Iran anymore.
So now they're using an inferior domestic alternative that gets attached to the blisters and, quote, causes excruciating pain for the patients when they have to be removed.
So, I mean, this is an example of, again, real life day to day suffering.
We're not talking about GDP.
We're not talking about an import export balance.
We're not talking about revenue and gross sales and all this type of thing.
We're talking about impacts on individual human beings in Iran.
And then these four words together, I just I don't even want to read the rest of the sentence here.
Pediatric Cancer Treatment Center.
Oh, wait.
Children with cancer.
Those are the most vulnerable and helpless people that all of the rest of humanity cares about the most compared to anyone else.
Right.
Other than just any specific man and his own child.
But in the abstract, these are the people we want to save the most, no matter what.
Right.
No, exactly.
Exactly.
I mean, these children have nothing to do with the spat between the geopolitics.
They're just trying to live their lives.
They're now trying to defeat cancer.
And here they are, unable to acquire the medications that they need to to do that.
And then then you come back and we think about these examples and then then you kind of circle back and and look at the rhetoric that's used by politicians who are champions of sanctions.
What's their what's their favorite adjective?
Crippling.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, every politician, both sides of the aisle, when they're boasting about sanctions that they're imposing, they talk about them being crippling.
And I mean, that's a that's a word meant to have a hard impact.
I think they like to think about it like, oh, we're being tough on the government of Iran.
But I mean, that that word crippling, talking about a pediatric cancer center, that word crippling has a much more important and pointed meaning about the impact of these sanctions than than it does when you're talking broadly about a country.
And in this in the piece at Stark Realities, I also talk about the rhetoric and examine the way some of these politicians talk about about sanctions.
And for one, one example is Representative Cardenas of California, California Representative Tony Cardenas.
In 2015, when he was opposing the Iran nuclear deal, he said, lessening sanctions would economically reward the Iranian people for supporting those who enslaved them.
How do you like that, Scott?
Sounds about right.
So I mean, that just goes to show that if he thinks that that would reward them for supporting those who enslaved them, then, you know, that means that imposing them is, in his view, a just punishment for the fact that these Iranian men, women and children, you know, implicitly tolerate the fact that they're governed by the people who they are governed, regardless of the extent they actually have any control over that.
Yeah, it's completely crazy.
And, I mean, there were arguments like that, you know, during the Cold War, too, that we ought to starve the Soviets out.
And if it, you know, takes, well, look at the policy to in Yemen, I mean, Yemen is under full blockade, literal siege by air and sea, and has been for six years.
And it hasn't, you know, and with all the air war, too, on top of that, and ground war, for that matter, it hasn't still hasn't changed the behavior of the targeted regime.
It's only and, and I mean, you couldn't exaggerate the level of suffering of the civilian population there.
And, and it should be said, too, that six years ago, when the war started, that all the humanitarian aid organizations said, No, no, no, you can't do this.
These people are desperately poor, and they import 80 to 90% of their food as it is already.
And you just we got to figure out another way to proceed.
And then they never did.
And so this is how it's been.
And right.
And the official numbers are that a quarter of a million people are dead, but those numbers are old.
And they must be vastly understated, compared to the reality of the situation that people have been living in there.
And so and with the Saudis with American help targeting all of the critical civilian infrastructure, you know, down to the farms and the fishermen and everything.
And so I bet you we're going to find out it's far worse than half a million people have died in that thing in the last six years.
And you know, Scott, and then they'll move on to the next one.
I don't know.
Right.
And, you know, I think for some people, they might think, well, you know, we're in, we're engaged in economic warfare.
And this is just collateral damage, like some sort of an accident.
But it's totally different from, you know, bombing a wrong target or so forth by accident.
I mean, this, as you pointed out, I mean, the warnings were there of the impact of this.
So I mean, you know, full well going in that you're going to be causing the misery that you are.
I'd point listeners to to a interesting piece of the gray zone last week by Max Blumenthal.
There's a current the current deputy Iran envoy, Richard Nephew, he was a Obama sanctions coordinator.
He wrote a book in 2017 called The Art of Sanctions, A View from the Field.
And Blumenthal took a good look at this book.
And, you know, you just see the, the immorality of the sanctions champions of just laid out there in front of you.
In the book, you see Nephew, celebrating the fact that chicken prices tripled during important Iranian holiday periods.
He, you know, admitted that they were targeting manufacturing jobs, you're putting people out of work.
Interestingly, he also boasted of having purposefully intensified wealth inequality by devaluing Iran's currency.
And this is a quote, okay, this is a quote from Richard Nephew, the sanctions champion, and by devaluing the currency, thus depriving most people of the practical benefit of being able to purchase humanitarian consumer or luxury goods.
To him, that was a plus.
So these people occasionally, as in the case of Nephew, are very explicit in their willful, inflicting of harm on civilians to advance their goals.
And, you know, I mean, that's the thing of it too, right is, well, two things.
First of all, I remember after Iraq war one, when the uprising, the crush uprising against Saddam was pretty brushed over, didn't get nearly as much attention as the war.
And then the ongoing blockade and sanctions regime to a kid who was like 15, 16, 17, and barely paying attention, you know, watch the news sometimes, but not the way I am now.
I didn't have to know about the sanctions and the suffering in Iraq at all.
And, you know, I think that's the situation probably if you compare me then to the way most people are now watch a little bit of news now and then try to keep up with, you know, barely, you know, the scuttlebutt around the water cooler or whatever about what's going on in the world, but not really focusing on it.
You might not have to know about any of this, that these people are suffering at all.
You hear about sanctions, you just think, well, it's against the evil Bashar al-Assad and his cronies or whatever it is, but nobody ever tells you that, hey, there are little kids with cancer who can't get their medicine.
And it's partially because of how little you care and how little attention you pay.
Right.
The emphasis is always on it.
We're sanctioning the regime, you know, the Iranian regime with no real communication or education of the people, the citizens of America or other sanctioning participants of what the impact is on on individual lives.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, man, we're so short on time here and we got to go.
But you wanted to make a point about Senator Menendez, Democrat from Tel Aviv, right?
Yeah, the New Jersey senator, I mean, he's he's one of the principal architects of sanctions.
I mean, when a new when new sanctions are introduced, he's invariably the Senate coauthor.
He's now and now he's chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
So in a good position to do that.
And I'm sure it's no coincidence whatsoever that he's among he really ranks highly amongst those receiving pro-Israel contributions in exchange for his sanctioning services against Israel's rival in the region, Iran.
I mean, in 2018, when last time he was running for his reelection, not only was he the top recipient of pro-Israel campaign money in the Senate, his total was 58 percent higher than second place Ted Cruz.
Wow.
So.
So, yeah, I mean, you can see kind of direct connection there between, you know, who who favors the sanctions regime and who's benefiting from them.
No question.
Phil Weiss had a great article about that earlier this week about Menendez and his Israel lobby ties.
So it's a good one.
All right.
Listen, I'm sorry.
I'm out of time and I'm late for my next guy.
Got to run.
But thank you so much for coming on the show.
I really appreciate talking to you again.
Well, thanks, guys.
Been great to be with you.
All right, man.
Talk to you soon, everybody.
That's the great Brian McGlinchey.
Check him out.
He's now at starkrealities.substack.com.
This great article is called Advocates of Economic Sanctions Mirror the Morality of Al Qaeda.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
