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Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

It's important to remember that US actions have consequences like this. No matter how poorly you think the Iranian government is behaving, our actions toward their country have led to hundreds of thousands of dead Iranians over the years. There is good reason for countries to doubt "US assistance," and further intrusion will likely cause tremendous suffering for their citizens.

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"our actions toward their country have led to hundreds of thousands of dead Iranians over the years."

This false and inflammatory, moreover, 'sanctions' are totally unrelated to 'assistance'.

Today, Iran can de-facto trade with most of the world either directly or through intermediaries. The purpose of any embargo is to weaken a state economically, not withhold specific medicines, obviously.

> Today, Iran can de-facto trade with most of the world either directly or through intermediaries. The purpose of any embargo is to weaken a state economically, not withhold specific medicines, obviously

This is not true. Even opening a foreign bank account (necessary for trade) is impossible for Iranians companies, making trade extremely difficult for all companies.

European banks are legally permitted to trade with Iranian companies, but the threat of fines from the U.S bars all of them from doing so.

> The purpose of any embargo is to weaken a state economically, not withhold specific medicines, obviously.

In reality, one of the immediate effects of sanctions is scarcity of medicine.

Source: I lived there through the Obama-era sanctions.

This perspective would make an excellent NYT piece.

Iran imports and exports about $50B worth of goods ever year.

You can see some figures for EU/Iran trade here [1]

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/count...

This is not a vivid picture I'm afraid. Most of Iran's exports are oil and other petrochemical products. The U.S is exempting Iran's trade partners from sanctions on the condition that they reduce their imports quarter by quarter. Ultimate goal is to bring petro export to certain countries to zero.

Iran also has trouble receiving payment for its oil. India, for example, used to have a deal in place (probably still does), that it would only pay Iran in Rupees. Your choice of cancer medicine is limited when you can only spend in Rupees, and so is your purchasing power.

And after all, this is just oil. It's sold by the government, and its proceeds are used for essential government functions, such as keeping the local currency afloat (which is now about 1/3 of its value compared to last year). Oil proceeds do not help the private sector in trade. An Iranian software company for example, does not export oil.

The EU recently opened a mechanism to allow banks to interact with Iran (INSTEX; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_in_Support_of_Trade... ). It is realtively recent and idk how much it will be used, but it is not an unsolvable problem (with some overhead).

There is huge pressure from the US to shut down that special trade mechanism even though none of countries involved support further sanctions. Numerous banks have backed away from it.

It's a token effort on the part of Europe to salvage the nuclear treaty that everyone agrees Iran is complying with. Even US intelligence publicly acknowledge it.

Amazed that NK can believe in any sort of deal after seeing what happened to Iran.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/world/europe/europe-trade...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19500900

>This false and inflammatory

The US provided arms to both sides of the Iraq-Iran war, which killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians. This is in addition to a host of other actions the US had taken that led to more death. If you find it inflammatory, imagine how you would feel if it was your family killed by these actions.

This is highly misleading. The US provided absolutely nothing to the Iranian Republic that superseded Imperial Iran.

That the US provided some weapons to people fighting a war, does not making them responsible for it.

Consider amending your sentence to state: "Saddam Hussein was responsible for the death of 100's of thousands of Iranians and Iraqis".

Of course, the US was not fuelling both sides of the war with weapons as your comment implies, US equipment in Iran was there long before the Islamic revolution, after which, and ever since, Iran has declared that they want to destroy the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. If they want to take that posture against powerful nations, and at the same time get pretty close to building nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to mount them - well - then they're picking a fight with entities much more powerful than them, which is why the sanctions were put in place to begin with.

Nobody wants to fight Iran, nobody wants sanctions. Really, everyone wants to make money if anything. The ball is effectively in their court.

>That the US provided some weapons to people fighting a war, does not making them responsible for it.

Yes, it does. Not soley responsible, but that blood is still on US hands.

>Of course, the US was not fuelling both sides of the war with weapons as your comment implies, US equipment in Iran was there long before the Islamic revolution,

I assumed you had heard of the Iran-Contra affair. My comment implies the reality.

>Iran has declared that they want to destroy the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. If they want to take that posture against powerful nations, and at the same time get pretty close to building nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to mount them - well - then they're picking a fight with entities much more powerful than them, which is why the sanctions were put in place to begin with

You act like they claim they wanted to destroy those nations for no reason. Decades of the US backed regime is what led to the Iranian revolution, which was just the tail end of Western powers looting Iran. A return to those conditions is what is still required of Iran to escape sanctions.

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