1/4 Broad sanctions are a weapon of mass destruction against civilian populations.This is the exact same situation I saw in Iraq 23 years ago when I traveled there, in violation of US-backed UN sanctions, to bring medicine to Iraqi hospitals. Hospitals with no medicine...
2/4 Children dying from malnutrition and respiratory infections, while US politicians like Madeleine Albright assured Americans that the death of hundreds of thousands of children was a price worth paying.
3/4 And here we are again, with US politicians across the spectrum, and opportunistic allies like Guaido’ declaring that the mass death and suffering is a price worth paying to drive Maduro from power, and enabling him to blame his problems on the US.
4/4 Kristof of course knows all of this. After all, he backed the Iraq sanctions in the 1990s that some UN officials called genocidal, and backed similar sanctions in Iran in recent years. So maybe he could reflect on his long support of this silent weapon of mass destruction.
Targeted sanctions against regime leaders is one thing. But the explicit logic of broad sanctions is to cause enough death and misery that desperate populations will overthrow their governments. Yet the effect is almost always the opposite, to make people more dependent on them.
