Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America, and by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright you guys, introducing Mohammad Sahimi.
He is a professor of chemical engineering at USC.
Economic sanctions will kill tens of thousands of innocent Iranians, and that's no hyperbole.
That's the headline at lobelog.com, the great Jim Loeb's blog, lobelog.com.
And of course we're running it, or we ran it yesterday actually, but you can find it on the Viewpoints page there at antiwar.com as well.
So yeah, you've been keeping very close track of the other side of the story.
Not the Iranian government side of the story, but the Iranian people's side of the story on the receiving end of Donald Trump's sanctions, which far surpass even Barack Obama's crippling sanctions of five or six years ago, which after all at that time had the waivers for Korea and Japan and I think a couple of other American allied states to go ahead and continue buying some oil.
Whereas Trump has even closed that off and really forced the Europeans out of really their end of the JCPOA in all but name by banning trade with Iran and all of these things.
And so we hear about all that, but so what does that mean for the people of Persia, Mohammad?
Well, as I explained in the piece that was published on Loeblog, it has affected millions of Iranians, because Iran has always depended on importing some critical medicine for life-threatening illnesses that people have.
And as I explained in the piece, the shortage of these medicines, and in fact in some cases the non-existence of these medicines, are threatening tens of thousands of Iranian people, if not more.
Now wait a minute, let me just ask you this, because I think people will say, but geez, surely Uncle Sam, even Donald Trump wouldn't put sanctions directly on medicine, would he?
Or would he?
And if not, then what explains it?
Well, officially exporting medicine to Iran is not sanctioned.
In fact, Brian Hook made a video a few days ago, a special Iran representative, claiming that medicine is not sanctioned, and therefore the Iranian government is lying.
But at the practical level, it is sanctioned, because of two reasons.
One is that when you buy something from outside, you have to pay for it.
And if you want to pay for it, you do it through banks.
Since Iranian banks and financial institutions have been cut off from the rest of the world, there is no mechanism to pay them, unless of course you put millions of dollars cash in an aircraft and send it to wherever you're supposed to send it, and hand deliver it, which of course is not practical.
During the Obama administration, when sanctions were in place, and again we had a shortage of medicine, in fact at that time I was the first one who reported it on antiwar.com, what the Iranian government at that time did was relying on private citizens in order to import these medicines.
But that led to huge corruptions and all sorts of things that still continue.
So the Rouhani administration has avoided that.
The second reason is that even if there were a mechanism of payment, major pharmaceutical companies are not willing to sell medicines to Iran at this point, because they are afraid that the Treasury Department will come after them, even if there is the slightest error in reporting this or that.
And in fact, before I was writing these, I personally contacted several major pharmaceutical companies in this country, and I asked them whether they are willing to supply Iran with some critical medicine that my wife and her colleagues and friends in Iran that have a network that helps people with shortage of medicine and so on, had told me about it.
Most of them didn't even respond, and one of them that responded, at this point, we cannot do that.
And the reason is, as I told you, they are afraid that the Treasury Department will come after them for whatever minor error that they may make, or somebody lobbies something and they will come after these people.
So on a practical level, export of medicine to Iran has stopped.
In other words, the accounting departments at their corporations have decided that the legal costs of making sure that they're doing it in a way that keeps them safe from the Treasury Department are too high, and so therefore cannot do it.
Exactly, and therefore they are not willing to do it, because they don't want to risk that.
Now, even at the personal level, just last week, my wife tried to send a small amount of supply for my father-in-law, who suffers from severe diabetes, and she took it to the post office.
They took the package.
It's a very small package.
They returned it first, saying that they didn't specify the price of it.
Then the second time they said, we cannot deliver it, we cannot send it overseas, because of the sanctions against Iran.
I mean, this was medicine supply.
It has no other use other than for my father-in-law's diabetes.
So officially they say they haven't sanctioned it, but on a practical level it has been sanctioned.
Just as, for example, they say food supplies is not sanctioned, but on a practical level it has been sanctioned.
And I gave one example of it in the piece that I published, in which, and this is very well known, two Iranian large ships carried some petrochemical products to Brazil, and Iran is a major importer of wheat and soybean and so on from Brazil, and they were supposed to take the wheat and soybean and so on that Iran had bought and paid for from Brazil, but they got stuck in Brazil because Petrobras, Brazilian oil company, refused to refuel the ships.
And therefore the ships stayed in Brazil for quite some time, until Brazil's Supreme Court intervened and ordered Petrobras to refuel the two ships, and they finally left Brazil, I think, the other day.
So that's another example of something that is officially not sanctioned, but when you come to practical level, it is sanctioned.
So these sanctions, as you mentioned at the beginning, is far worse than anything that Obama administration imposed on Iran.
And in fact it is anything far worse than was imposed on Iraq during 1990s.
And let me remind you that during 1990s, before the program Oil for Food was put in place in 1995 or 1996, the United Nations organization UNICEF reported that as a result of sanctions against Iraq at that time, at least 576,000 Iraqi children have died because of malnutrition, lack of medicine, and all sorts of other things that were sanctioned.
So why would I believe that with sanctions imposed on Iran, which is far more draconian than whatever that was imposed on Iraq, and with Iran's population being three times larger than Iraq, and with the strategic chokehold that they put on Iran, any fewer number of Iranians will lose their lives than the Iraqis did.
This is going to kill hundreds of thousands, and I put cautiously tens of thousands, but I'm sure it will be even hundreds of thousands of people, of innocent Iranians, will be killed simply because of this policy of Trump, the maximum pressure put on Iran to come to the table.
And the most ridiculous aspect of it is...
Let me stop you right there.
Hold that point.
I'll let you go in just one second.
But I've got to clarify one point here real quick, which is that that particular study about the 500,000 was discredited.
There was one person on that team that outright forged the results, essentially.
But there were later studies, and the most persuasive one is by Dr. Richard Garfield from 1999.
And I talked to him on the show about a year ago about this, that the real number is probably around 300,000, which is still an absolute massacre.
Imagine rounding up 300,000 people, especially children, and machine gunning them to death.
It's the same thing.
I just want to clarify that one point, because that particular study itself, it wasn't just exaggerated, but there was particular fraud and problems with that study, and it's important that we make sure that we get our facts right on that.
And then I guess you could also say that Iraq had just been smashed by America in a war right before the blockade, whereas Iran has been at peace since America and Iraq's war against them ended in 1989.
So they have a little bit of an advantage there.
But don't get me wrong.
I mean, you go through, and it's a lot bigger country with a lot bigger population.
So never mind proportions, because that's not the question.
Raw numbers of individual human beings here.
You could have just as many or maybe more people die of otherwise treatable diseases or deprivation of other kinds brought on by these sanctions.
It is essentially a total economic war.
And you know what, Mohamed, there's a piece in the Washington Post today by Jason, I'm sorry how you say his name.
Jason Rezaian, yes.
Yeah, Rezaian, who had been imprisoned over there as an accused spy and all these things.
And he's saying, listen, we have to be straight up about what's going on here.
It's not that they're going to invade.
It's that they think that they can weaken the Iranian regime so much through this economic war, as they put it.
It's on its last legs.
Somehow the Iranian people, some combination of factions of the Iranian people, are going to rise up and depose the mullahs once and for all.
And once that happens and they create a pro-American democratic regime there, then we can be friends again and it'll be a whole new day.
And that way we won't have to have a war of regime change.
We'll just force this to happen through these sanctions.
And that we at least ought to be honest that the policy here is not to one, provoke a war or two, to get a better deal.
It's to try to force the Iranian people to revolt, which is the same policy of against Iraq in the 90s, which, of course, brought on the 9-11 attacks by basing that policy out of Saudi Arabia.
They're moving troops back into Saudi right now, by the way.
And this is the same thing that's not worked in Cuba for generations, that's not working in Venezuela, that even combined with a war is not working to depose the Houthis in Yemen.
And is obviously completely stupid and ridiculous.
And we could see how Americans would support even Bill Clinton, George Bush, Obama, Donald Trump or anyone else as our leader in the face of this kind of aggression against our country.
And patriotism translates in a crisis to support for the current regime in essentially all cases.
And if anybody knows any examples of where this worked, I'm happy to hear them.
But otherwise, what this is, it's a scientifically proven failure of a policy, and they're doing it anyway, starving and killing people.
Well, first of all, let me thank you for correcting me about the UNICEF report, which I was not aware of it.
Yeah, I know that really did not get around our side of the debate very much at all.
It was covered by some right-wingers.
But when it was brought to my attention about a year ago, I went back and interviewed even the UN guys involved and all kinds of things about it to try to make sure it gets straight.
And it's Richard Garfield, by the way, who's the guy you want to read on that.
Yes, I will look into it.
But secondly, as you also pointed out, I don't think even killing one person because of lack of medicine that he could or she could have had it but does not have it because of these sanctions is too many, let alone a thousand or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands.
Of course.
Secondly, as much as I would like to see a democratic regime in Iran, as much as I'd like to see the Mullahs leave politics and go back to their seminaries, the maximum pressure policy is not going to overthrow the Iranian regime.
There is just no way.
In fact, if you look at objective reports by many, many reporters, they have been saying that if anything, this has actually unified Iranian people against the Trump administration.
When we had demonstrations like a year and a half ago in Iran, there were scattered demonstrations around Iran in several cities, all the major, even mainstream media in this country reported that, including the New York Times, reported that the middle class and upper class in Iran never joined these demonstrations.
The demonstrations were limited simply because they thought that if they joined the protest against the economic conditions and corruptions in the government, Iran would quickly be turned into another Syria or another Iraq or maybe even another Libya, and therefore they stayed home.
Iranian people have generally been poor America in the sense that Iranian people like the United States, they send their children to this country, they come and visit this country, and so on.
And this is, in fact, opposite of what we see in many, many other Islamic countries where the regime is supported by the United States, but the population is against the United States.
And in fact, the reason the population is against the United States is because the regime is supported by United States.
Now, what the Trump administration policy has done is changing that equation.
Now, most Iranians, at least based on what I read and what I follow and the conversations that I have and so on, hold the Trump administration responsible for the current situation.
They say that the Rouhani administration came into office promising people that they would resolve the nuclear issue so that economic sanctions can be lifted and investment can flow to Iran and economy can improve, which in fact, if that had happened, it would have helped the cause of democracy.
Because in any country, when the middle class is feeling secure about its economic situation, it turns its attention to politics, demanding more rights, demanding more freedom, and so on and so forth.
But when people are just too preoccupied with their daily lives, trying to survive in the worst economic conditions that Iran is living under, there is no talk of democracy.
Nobody cares about democracy and freedom of expression and so on.
In fact, there was a very good piece on Al-Banitor by an Iranian teacher union activist.
He himself has been jailed several times.
And he wrote in Al-Banitor that the economic sanctions have basically killed the political activity of their union, because before the sanctions, they were pressuring the government to not only improve their economic conditions and their salaries and benefits and so on, they were also pressuring the Iranian government to change the educational system, to give more freedom to the union members and people at large and so on.
And because of that, some of the leaders have actually gone to jail.
And he said in the Al-Banitor piece that in fact the government was finally responding and had started to reform the educational system, give more freedom to unions and so on.
But because of the sanctions, all of that has stopped, because now the government and the people are just concerned with daily survival of their lives.
So that is not going to happen.
The Iranian regime, at least in its present form, as much as I'd like them to just disappear, is not going to be overthrown.
And you gave already excellent examples.
Cuba has been under sanction since early 1960s.
It has never been overthrown.
They thought that they could overthrow the government in Venezuela back in January.
It didn't happen.
North Korea has been under sanctions for decades.
It hasn't happened.
It's not going to happen, because what happens is that it unifies people against the foreign external threat.
And Iran case is the same thing.
Right.
And they're also going to be extra organized against any internal group that is trying to sow dissent inside of that.
Just the same way we see the American Left and Right Act when they're in power, especially.
But when there's a real threat like this, and then you have, what, some group of student radicals come out?
Everyone is just going to see them as CIA infiltrator fifth columnists trying to undermine the country and then the people, not just the government.
No one is going to say, oh, yeah, now's the time to exploit the opportunity the Americans are giving us to try to take on the...
I mean, imagine the...
And, of course, so this is the other thing then about Jason Razian's whatever article there is, but that's stupid and can't work.
And so maybe the policy really is not a better deal and not force the people of Iran to rise up, but to try everything till they get to the point where they can say, I guess we do just have to bomb them.
Because only that will work.
And probably that wouldn't work either.
Right.
These Ayatollahs all have basements.
Yes, of course.
I mean, not only that will not happen, as you mentioned, and as also Jason Razian mentioned in his article, but in fact, it has played into the hands of the hardliners in Iran.
Because the hardliners in Iran were opposed to nuclear negotiations.
They were saying that we cannot trust the United States.
They come to an agreement.
They take something away from us.
But then when it comes to them, you know, living up to their obligation, they will not deliver.
And what the Trump administration did is precisely what they had said they would do.
They signed the agreement.
Some of the sanctions were lifted.
But then Trump came into office and, you know, exceeded the agreement and imposed not only the previous sanctions, but far worse sanctions.
So this has played into the hands of hardliners.
And Pompeo and Bolton and people like them claim that, you know, we want to get rid of the hardliners, the radicals.
We want to make Iran a normal country and so on.
But what they have done has played into their hands.
Now, as you said, who is going to challenge the hardliners about the United States not being trustworthy?
It has been proven that it is not trustworthy.
It has been proven that it does not live up to its obligation.
And it's not just the nuclear agreement with Iran, because Trump also abandoned the Paris agreement on climate change.
Trump also abandoned the agreement on, you know, Pacific Ocean trade agreement and so on, whether we agree with those agreements or not.
But he abandoned them.
So this is not just Iran.
And it has shown, it has been proven very clearly that at least this administration cannot be trusted.
And that has helped the radicals in Iran, the radicals that people like me like to just disappear somehow or become moderate or whatever that can happen to them, so that Iranian people can get what they deserve, namely a democratic political system in Iran.
Now, but what about Rouhani?
Because it seems like if anybody's discredited here, it's not the Ayatollahs, other than to the degree that it's their fault that the Ayatollah went ahead and blessed the rise of Rouhani and blessed Rouhani's negotiations with the Obama administration for this nuclear deal, which turned out to blow up completely in their face.
Yes, Khamenei has said many, many times.
He said that when the negotiations were going to start, I told our president that I don't think we can trust them.
But because people want this, and because you are advocating this, you should go ahead and negotiate.
Now we saw what happened.
So in other words, go ahead, but when it doesn't work, it's not my fault.
So Rouhani's left out there dangling in the wind, and Ayatollah turns his back on him.
Exactly, exactly.
And everything that Rouhani did was with the approval of Khamenei, but now Khamenei says, well, I told you so.
I told you that you cannot trust these guys.
So who is being blamed?
Rouhani and his foreign minister, Javad Zarif, and so on.
Now, the most ridiculous aspect of this is that they also sanctioned Javad Zarif, Iranian foreign minister.
And what was the excuse?
The excuse was that he's carrying out the policy of the supreme leader, Khamenei.
Well, doesn't Pompeo also carry out the policy of President Trump?
Isn't in any country true that the foreign minister carries the policy and orders of the leader of that country?
Zarif works within that system.
He's the foreign minister of that system.
Obviously, he has to implement the policy that has been designed by the supreme leader and the president.
So saying that, oh, he's just carrying out orders of Khamenei, you know, and he doesn't have any authority, is totally ridiculous.
So what is he looking for?
He's looking for a foreign minister who has his own base of power, who can on his own negotiate with the United States, who can basically capitulate to the 12 demands of Pompeo and Bolton regarding Iran becoming a so-called normal state, and then also has the base of power in Iran to go around the president and the supreme leader and the army and so on and implement that agreement.
Come on, this is out of this world.
No, don't worry.
They're going to get Juan Guaido to declare himself the new Ayatollah, and everything is going to fall into place.
So this morning, Al Monitor had another report that Iranian people have reacted very, very negatively about sanctions of Javad Zarif, because Zarif is one of the most popular politicians in Iran.
Everybody knows that he's a moderate guy.
Everybody knows that he wants to improve the relation between Iran and the West, and in particular the United States.
And what, in my opinion, angered Pompeo was the fact that when he was given visa to come to the United States, even though they limited his movement between Iran, between, you know, United Nations and Iran mission in New York, he took advantage of this, spoke to American people, spoke to politicians, spoke to Rand Paul and so on, and conveyed a message of moderation and readiness to negotiate with the United States.
In fact, he offered a proposal.
He said that according to the nuclear agreement, we are supposed to get approval by our parliament, the additional protocol of nuclear, the NPT, by 2023.
And this is 2019.
We offer to do it now, right now, so that all provisions of additional protocol, which gives the International Atomic Energy Agency extra authority to inspect and monitor all of Iran's nuclear facilities, and in fact non-nuclear facilities if necessary, now in return for the United States to leave its sanction.
But that was rejected right away, saying that this is not negotiation.
The negotiations they are talking about is about capitulation of Iran, and that is not going to happen.
And especially, I mean, Zarif is, I believe, was educated in Denver, Colorado, and is a very, you know, westernized sort of a character, famously got along really well with John Kerry in working out the nuclear deal.
And so from the point of view of the empire, if you're really trying to get compliance out of these guys, he's probably the best you could hope for in terms of who do you think you could send back to the Ayatollah to say, listen, I think this is the best we're going to get, and we should go ahead and do it, than him.
There's no one else in Persia who's got a better chance at getting the Iranian government to think that, yeah, okay, this deal would be good enough for them, one that the Americans would be willing to settle for, if that's even possible within the realm of possibility at all.
He's your most talented guy.
And so the fact that they're trying to marginalize him, again, just fits with the larger pattern of trying to foment a crisis rather than avert one.
Yes, and in fact, if you look at Rouhani's cabinet, it's not just Zarif who got his education in the United States.
Several of them got their education in the United States.
And Rouhani intentionally selected this for his cabinet because he knew that they are familiar with the United States and the West.
They got their education.
They live there.
They know what language they should use, whether it is politics, foreign policy, or economics, commerce, and so on.
So as you said, this is the best chance that this administration has in order to reach some sort of agreement with the Iranian regime or Iranian political system, and in particular with the Rouhani administration.
For the past several weeks, hardliners in Iran have been broadcasting sort of fictional theories about political development in Iran.
But although it appears to be fictional, they have targeted several moderate figures within the Rouhani administration, and in particular Zarif.
They have been attacking him without naming him.
They have been attacking him for reaching the agreement with the United States.
And Zarif actually wrote a letter to Khamenei telling him that if these attacks continue, he cannot continue his job.
His job is to defend Iran, and while he's being attacked domestically, he cannot continue like this.
And Khamenei also responded right away that, you know, I condemn this and basically have ordered that to be stopped.
So this is not what Pompeo wants.
Pompeo, as I said, wants basically a sort of an American puppet that has authority to do whatever he wants in Iran and negotiate with him about the 12 conditions that he has set.
But that's not going to happen, not just in Iran, in any country.
No country, no political system that has a yoke of self-respect, that has a yoke of self-determination, and, you know, considers itself an independent country, is going to negotiate and capitulate to the conditions that Pompeo and Bolton have set.
But this is a totally unrealistic policy.
Right.
Which goes to show that either they are so stuck in the mind frame, as Gareth Porter calls it, in the perils of dominance, of thinking they're so powerful that no one else does have a red line.
Everyone else will capitulate.
They'll do what we say because look how much bigger and more powerful we are than them.
Yes.
That's just not true.
Or, two, the other choice, they're so cynical, they're still just pretending, and they know that this is really just an offer that they can't possibly accept on the line of the Rambouillet Accord, or whichever example you have.
Prove the negative about where all your mustard gas isn't, or what they did to Saddam Hussein and this kind of thing, as a pretext for worse conflict.
Yes.
And, in fact, if they haven't been able to do that, for example, to the Houthis, for four and a half years, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, with the support of Britain and the United States, have been attacking Yemen, have been bombing them, have killed tens of thousands of them.
There are all sorts of epidemics in Yemen.
People are starving and so on.
But yet they haven't been able to force the Houthis to surrender, to capitulate, and go along or accept their condition.
So, if they haven't been able to do that, how are they going to do that to Iran?
And Iran, aside from anything else, Iran is a nation that has existed for several thousands of years.
And, therefore, Iranian nationalism is extremely fierce and strong.
And although people, the large majority of people, do not like the political system that they have, and, in particular, they don't like Khamenei, they are going to defend their country against any foreign intervention and any sort of invasion or any sort of pressure.
And, as I said, what Trump administration has done, in fact, has unified Iranian people, because they think that, at least in this particular case, it is the fault of the United States that Iran has been put in this situation.
Because Iran went along, Iran negotiated, Iran made a lot of concessions regarding its nuclear program.
Iran limited it.
Iran gave up a lot of rights that it had under NPT.
And, in return, Iran was supposed to benefit from the lifting of economic sanctions, investment, and so on.
And, in 2016, the year after the nuclear agreement was signed, Iran's economy grew by 12.5 percent, which was huge, and had really made people hopeful for the future.
Young people had started their own start-ups.
A lot of economic activity was going on, and all of that was destroyed.
As soon as Trump announced his intention to leave the nuclear agreement, and a year later he actually left the agreement, everything went back.
All the Europeans pulled out of Iran.
All the agreements that had been signed with European corporations were either canceled or suspended.
The export of Iranian oil went down.
Iranian currency lost its value, 80 percent, 70 percent of its value.
The inflation that had brought under control during the Rouhani administration, from something like 40 percent during the Obama sanction, to less than 10 percent during the first two or three years of the Rouhani administration, jumped back up to about 40 percent again.
Unemployment went up because the economy is in a very bad situation.
And, in fact, statistics show that in the first six months of 2019, the Iranian economy basically contracted by 6 percent.
And that's a huge percentage for any economy, let alone a country with 83, 84 million people.
So, in this particular case, Iranian people hold the Trump administration and the United States responsible for what's happening to them.
So it's not going to happen that they are going to rise up and overthrow the regime, because under these conditions they feel that their priority is to protect Iran from becoming another Syria or another Iraq, or another Libya, or another Yemen, or another Afghanistan, and so on.
So it's not going to happen, just as it has not happened in Cuba, in Venezuela, in North Korea, and many, many other countries around the world that have been put under U.S. sanctions.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for your time again on the show, Mohamed.
Great to talk to you.
Thank you for having me back in your program, Scott.
Really appreciate it.
All right, you guys, that is the great Mohamed Sahimi.
He's over there at LobeLog, you know, like your ear lobe is how it's spelled, Jim Lobe's blog, LobeLog.
And this one is called Economic Sanctions Will Kill Tens of Thousands of Innocent Iranians.
And you can find it, again, the link is in the viewpoint section at antiwar.com.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
