All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is Kate Gould.
She is a legislative associate for foreign policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, one of the most important peace groups in America.
They actually really do that whole rubber meets the road thing and work very hard up there on Capitol Hill for peace.
Welcome to the show, Kate.
How are you?
I'm doing well.
Thank you, Scott.
And thank you for that lovely introduction, and thanks for your support.
I really am a big fan of your show, and I appreciate your work.
Great.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate that.
All right, so your piece, Nuclear Option Against Iran's Economy Paves Way for War, is the spotlight today at antiwar.com, as well as should be.
Good choice, Jeremy or Matt, whoever that was.
What's today?
Yeah, I guess it would have been Matt.
Very important piece about this new round of sanctions against Iran.
I'm not so sure because there are so many different rounds of sanctions against Iran.
When something is an inching up or when it's a big step up, but it sounds like this is a nuclear option.
That sounds pretty bad.
Sanctions against their central bank.
What exactly would that mean?
Yes, this would be a seismic step up in hostility towards Iran and towards really devastating the U.S. and could potentially have impacts on the U.S. and global economy and also inflict untold humanitarian suffering in Iran.
And I actually have some news about this legislation that came about since I published the article.
Actually, the Senate could vote as early as this week on this legislation.
This is Senator Kirk's amendment.
Senator Kirk from Illinois has offered legislation that would require the administration to sanction Iran's central bank, as you mentioned.
And I should mention that the term the nuclear option, I didn't make that up.
That's a term that has been used by many U.S. officials who use that term precisely because it would be expected to spike gas prices in the U.S. and worldwide, which would, of course, roil international energy and financial markets during a time of global economic crisis, to say nothing of the kind of untold humanitarian suffering it would cause inside Iran.
And now there's been some changes in what's going on in the Senate floor, but basically this was supposed to be attached to the international affairs bill, and that's now stalled.
But now the Senate has taken up the defense authorization bill.
So for all of your listeners who are concerned about a number of different issues with the war in Afghanistan, all that, it's a very important time to weigh in with Congress because they're debating that right now, the Senate is.
And there's a number of very alarming amendments, including this one, to require the administration to sanction the central bank of Iran, which would be the most draconian sanctions measure we've had yet.
Yeah, and this is really the fight is over the amendments because any question of passing the appropriations, large-scale appropriations bill is always a fait accompli, right?
Right.
Well, and actually this bill that they're debating right now is the defense authorization bill, so it's not a funding bill, but it's definitely a must-pass bill, yes.
So that's why these amendments, this is really the fight is ramping up on these amendments and a very important time to weigh in.
Okay, so as far as the problem here, I guess I take it then that the Iranian central bank basically handles all the transactions in buying and selling their oil, and this would presumably somehow shut that entire system down.
They would not be able to sell their oil and it would ripple into this big crisis.
Is that basically the point here?
Yes.
I mean, that's basically it.
There are many questions about what the U.S. could implement even if it wants to shut down the Iranian economy, to actually shut down the Iran central bank.
A number of questions about, well, even if the U.S. did this, what would our allies do, what would other countries do, and questions about whether Iran central bank could then sell to other countries and in that way backfill from these sanctions.
But it could potentially sanction any transaction in Iranian currency.
So that would destabilize the Iranian rial, the Iranian currency, and could be quite catastrophic inside Iran, and of course there are no borders on what that economic damage could do and could have profound ripple effects throughout the global economic system.
So it means basically any corporation based outside of Iran who tries to do business in Iranian dollars with their government in any way, we would then hit them with, I don't know, I'm not exactly sure how it works.
Right.
We would say you can either do business with us, or if you do business with Iran then, you know, so it's either us or them, you can do business with us or Iran, and that's it.
And when Iran supplies so much of the world's oil, that would mean that countries would have to make some pretty tough decisions.
And did I read this article right, that the bill takes away the president's authority to decide whether to implement these sanctions, which if I understand it right, usually that kind of authority is granted the president in these things.
Right.
So this legislation in the Senate does not provide for a presidential waiver.
On national security grounds, it would require the administration to implement these broad sweeping sanctions.
And now this recent attempt to ban, or maybe ongoing attempt to ban any diplomatic relations with Iran, is that part of this same package?
It's not, so that's in the House.
But lots of, that's right.
I mean there is a bill in the House, this is another Iran sanctions bill, and actually I have an article about that too, it's called Will Congress Take Iran Diplomacy Off the Table, that was published in The Hill yesterday, and with some more explanation on that.
But basically it would prohibit any contact from any U.S. government employee, so we're not just talking about, you know, the U.S. diplomats, we're talking about even perhaps U.S. postal carriers, would be prohibited from any contact with any Iranian official who presents a threat to the United States.
Now how that threat determination would be made is unclear, from the text of the bill itself.
But, and it could be that the administration would actually make that determination, and it could certainly be the case that this would, if this was enacted into law, this would be found unconstitutional, since it severely undermines the President's authority to conduct diplomacy.
But it just, it shows that Congress is really, many in Congress are out to make a diplomatic resolution of conflicts with Iran absolutely impossible.
Well, I guess there's no hope that they would even really try this, hope from their point of view, that they would even try this in the U.N. Security Council, because Russia and China wouldn't adopt this, the way they did against Iraq, correct?
Yeah, so back to the central bank sanctions.
Yeah.
It seems very unlikely, right, that they could get, well, and not just Russia and China, I mean to get the Europeans to go on board with this.
I mean there's been, because there's so much concern in Europe about the business impacts that this would have, I mean the effect on the European economy, which obviously needs help now and doesn't need another crisis.
And also the humanitarian impact that this would have on Iranians, especially of course looking at the legacy of the Iraq sanctions.
So the U.N. Security Council did impose sanctions on the central bank of Iraq and the central bank of Libya, and of course those efforts ultimately ended in war.
The U.S. was part of that effort, but the U.S. has never before imposed unilateral extraterritorial sanctions on a central bank anywhere in the world.
So this would, you know, this has profound implications on U.S. policy that go beyond Iran, because it's really about, the intent is to shut down the Iranian economy.
All right, hold it right there.
It's Kate Gould, everybody, from the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
That's fcnl.org.
Quaker Peace Group.
And we're talking about the new Iran sanctions in the Senate.
Hold it right there.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Kate Gould.
She used to be at Just Foreign Policy.
She's now at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
She's the legislative associate for Middle Eastern foreign policy, and we're talking about these new sanctions going through the Senate against Iran's central bank.
And tell me, it just couldn't be so that Congressman Howard Berman actually said the purpose was, or was it Brad Sherman?
I'm sorry.
Sherman.
Go ahead.
What did he say now?
What?
Well, Sherman, Brad Sherman, who, one of these prominent proponents of sanctions, has actually said that the critics argued that sanctions on Iran would hurt the Iranian people, and quite frankly we need to do just that.
This was in an op-ed that was published in The Hill in August 2010.
And, you know, I think it's just another demonstration that proponents of sanctions, they believe that by pressuring Iran, by pressuring the Iranian people, that that's a means to force Iranians to make things so difficult, to make life so impossible, that the population would just boil over with rage and in either one of two ways, either force their government, either get so angry that they force their government to comply with U.S. demands, or that they, and I think this would be the favorite option for many of these proponents, of course, would be to overthrow the regime altogether.
And, you know, but of course, when he said that, and in his op-ed talking about, you know, his argument, of course, is that, well, yes, we have to hurt the Iranian people, just like we hurt the South Africans, all South Africans, not just whites but also black South Africans, during sanctions on South Africa.
You know, of course, what he doesn't mention at all is that the Iranian human rights activist, Iranian pro-democracy activist, have been, you know, vociferously opposed to sanctions against Iran.
And they've said, I mean, you know, there's a Nobel laureate, Shirin Abadi, who said that we oppose military attack on Iran or economic sanctions because it hurts the people or it's a detriment to the people.
And then you have the leading reformist politicians of Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, who said, you know, in a public letter to, that obviously their audience was the international community, they said sanctions have only targeted the most vulnerable social classes of Iran, including workers and farmers.
And so, and that, they're talking about sanctions, of course, that have already been imposed and the U.S. has had sanctions on Iran since 1979.
So, but sanctioning Iran Central Bank would be an entire, you know, particularly if the U.S. is able to bring along some of its, some of its allies, then this would really have devastating impacts against, you know, the Iranian people, making it all the more difficult to get, you know, humanitarian food stuff, to buy anything with their currency to, you know, to export, to import for small, small businesses that are already shutting down in Iran.
And all the while, you know, it could be a great boost for the, you know, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards for Iran's cash reserves and could actually embolden, you know, the hardliners in the Iranian government because they would benefit from the spike in gas prices.
Well, and as we saw this week, there were protests in reaction to the IAEA report saying, well, maybe we should just withdraw from the treaty then.
And so, you know, all of this pressure just seems to, and that was the people out there protesting.
It wasn't, I don't think, just a bunch of government employees or something.
That was the natural reaction to these external threats is to solidify support for the Ayatollah.
Right, yes, yeah, exactly.
I mean, the nuclear program itself has, you know, as many polls have shown, has a lot of support in Iran.
There's a lot of support among the population for a peaceful nuclear program.
And, you know, the reformists that supposedly some in Congress are trying to support their claim is that, you know, they want a nuclear program too.
And so, I mean, it has wide support this idea that they have the right to a peaceful nuclear program.
And the U.S., you know, yeah, these provocative measures only make things worse, solidify, you know, the hardliners, as you said.
And, you know, in this particular case, sanctioning the Central Bank of Iran, I mean, this is something that Iranian officials, well, that many Iranian officials have said for a long time that they would consider this as an act of war.
You know, there is this argument that some analysts have put forward that sanctioning any central bank is an act of war because of the sovereign immunity that central banks have, you know, our central bank being the Federal Reserve.
Well, great.
Maybe we can maneuver them into firing the first shot and fight a defensive war.
Well, unfortunately, it seems like that's what some in Congress are thinking about or, more to the point, are not thinking about.
And that's why people need to weigh in.
You make a great point in your essay.
You point to Professor Robert Pate talking about the effectiveness of sanctions and how it never works, that really all it is is a prelude to war.
And then the talking point goes, and we heard it in 2002 and 2003, all the sanctions in the world just have failed to bend Saddam Hussein to our will.
We're going to have to go ahead and take the next step now.
These people just can't be dealt with, et cetera, et cetera.
They only understand one thing, force.
You know the drill.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah, Dr. Pate, he published that study in the Harvard Journal of International Security and came to the conclusion that sanctions have failed to achieve their objective in 95.7% of cases since World War I and that sanctions are more than three times more likely to end in military conflict than success.
So, yeah, it's a very damning report.
And it's interesting.
I mean, I've heard from so many congressional offices and from members themselves that they've said publicly even that they have supported sanctions because, you know, you have to do something and they don't want the U.S. to Congress to go even farther.
And, you know, so they want to try to, I mean, it's almost like they're voting, the thumb in Congress are voting for these sanctions to appease the hawks rather than because they think it, you know, has anything to do with Iran, that it's a way to just try to say to people, okay, well, we're doing something.
But that's not the impact at all that you're actually emboldening, you know, the proponents of war in this country as well because then they'll just say, oh, you know, they're not even betting that sanctions, you know, in many cases will work.
And so you're just empowering them to be able to say, oh, well, you know, we have to go towards war.
Yeah, they ought to check their own talking points.
Appeasement doesn't work.
It only emboldens the terrorists.
Right, exactly.
It's a shame.
So is there any organized opposition against this on Capitol Hill other than the Friends Committee?
And how could people help the Friends Committee?
Of course there is, and it's very important that everybody get involved.
So please, listeners out there, please call your senator, call both of your senators.
You can reach them at the congressional hotline, 202-224-3121, and tell your senators to vote against the Senator Kirk amendment to sanction the Central Bank of Iran and that you don't want to see the kinds of devastating impacts that that would have on the U.S. and global economy and the humanitarian suffering that would happen to Iran.
And then, of course, on the House side, too, that, yeah.
Wait, let me interrupt for a second.
Sorry.
Can you tell me an anecdote about that actually working?
Somebody called their senator, because I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying it's kind of hard to believe, but do you know of a time where a senator got a phone call and thought, man, you know what?
These people seem to have a point.
I do.
I do know of some, of course, the best ones are ones that I can't give the names for, but I have heard about members of Congress who, I mean, this is actually very common, that members of Congress will check in.
You know, they're going, they're shuttling back and forth from their offices to the floor, and they will say, you know, they'll ask their staff, okay, what's the buzz?
You know, what's the buzz in the office?
What are people calling about?
Are people calling about this issue?
I mean, they're, you know, they have to make all these decisions.
I mean, I briefly worked in a congressional office and just saw how people are, you know, they're being briefed on the way to the floor on some of these issues.
I mean, it was really surprising to me because, you know, they do, there's just so much to do, and so they're briefed on the floor there, and they're briefed.
One of the questions that often, you know, members of Congress ask and their staffers tell them about is what, you know, what are the positions of people calling in from the districts?
So I think it can have a tremendous impact.
These calls are counted.
All right.
I'm sorry we're so short on time, but we've got to go.
It's fcnl.org, the Friends Committee on National Legislation opposing these new sanctions against Iran.
Thank you very much for your time, Kate.
And fcnl.org/Iran for issues on this.
Very good.
Thank you.
Kate Gould, everybody.
And we'll see you all tomorrow.
