The Sanctions Trap

By Scott Ritter

"....This, of course, is the crux of the quandary posed by the issue of sanctioning Iran: in a game defined by the principles of global consensus, the United States plays only by the rules of unilateral intervention. Russia and China, and to a lesser extent France, Great Britain and Germany, may view the sanctions as a vehicle for a diplomatic resolution of the issues. The United States views the sanctions as a means to a different end, this one culminating in the elimination of the theocratic regime in Tehran. The world fell into the sanctions trap when trying to deal with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, allowing the United States to distract everyone with the issue of WMD, all the while pushing for Saddam's demise. The United States never had any intention of abiding by either the intent or letter of the law when it came to sanctioning Iraq. The only endgame possible was that which met the objectives of regime change in Baghdad.....

With the US military positioning itself operationally and logistically for action sometime this spring, and the level of rhetoric by President Bush and his advisors on Iran being hyped up to near fever pitch, the last thing the international community should be doing is facilitating conflict by helping sustain the logic of Iran as a threat at the very time Iran's status as a nation compliant with international law is being certified. But the tragic genius of the "sanctions trap" is that, once initiated, it is virtually impossible to shut off. By putting the credibility of the Security Council on the line in imposing the sanctions regime against Iran, the members of the Council who view UN action as a means of containing US ambition and aggression have themselves allowed the issue of defending the will of the Council in the face of continued Iranian rejection of the Council's decisions to become the central issue, and not the matter which led them to originally impose sanctions to begin with, that being Iran's nuclear program. The "sanctions trap" is built upon the principles of hubris and procedure, not reason and fact. This is the reason the Bush administration continues to invest so heavily in this process, and why in the end the "sanctions trap," if not prematurely sprung, will in the end lead us to war with Iran . The message is simple: stop the sanctions, stop the war. "