Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

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Two kind of sanctions:

- sanction the leaders responsible and their buddies, the most common (that's what we do with russia, turkey, ...), hurt their wallet but ultimately is a soft sanction, and also your populace sees it as ineffective / nothing is done

- sanction the country directly, embargo, complete block, kick out of swift, that sort of stuff is what was done to Iran. Can only be done if you're part of the bigger/more powerful group. Massive effect, causes lots of poverty and pain for the populace but that's on purpose, so they are forcing their leaders to change some stuff. Doesn't always work, but both outcome are victories in a way: either the country is forced to change and stop the original abuse, or it doesn't change but is so crippled that it's not longer a problem.

This is bound to something very, very, important: if the country does change and does what you asked, you start lifting.

Part of the message that's more of an european rant: that's why Trump action on the Iran deal was a disaster, because, now the population doesn't believe it's their own leaders fault, and even if they did their leaders don't believe it would ease if they did what was asked. That's how you end up with a north korea.

According to every report I've seen, Iran was fully respecting their part of the deal, and allowing all the inspection necessary, when the USA did a "AHAH ! it's a trap !" trick on them and screwed them. You're not convincing countries to behave, you're telling them that if they don't behave, they better go all the way to the other side.

> Massive effect, causes lots of poverty and pain for the populace but that's on purpose

This is what I'm talking about. Even if I'm to agree with the purpose of the requested change, does it justify the means by which it's being procured?

Trump may have screwed it up even more, but sanctions of the second kind have been introduced on countries like Iran or Syria since the mid-80s afaik. No major change happened, but the idea of knowingly use the population of another country to pressure their government which is known to not be chosen democratically is basically a form of hostage situation, and is immoral imho.

The alternatives:

1. Bomb them back into the stone age. That would kill a whole bunch of people, who as you point out are basically held hostage by their government and don't get much choice in the matter. It'd also permanently wreck their economy and infrastructure, cost lives on both sides, and usually has follow on effects.

2. Do nothing and allow things like funding terrorism, selling arms, committing atrocities, etc. You would know these things are going on, and therefore be allowing them to happen, and these things would probably be happening to your own people and allies.

Which one would you rather take?

These are not the only options.

Funding of terrorism is still happening now, and their support is being funnelled through countries that are not under any economic restrictions, some even have good relations with US, like KSA. For example, most official fundamental/terroristic TV channels/groups are based there. Most shell companies used by oppressing regimes in MidEast are in the UAE.

I don't understand your comment as the countries you list are not under sanctions like the ones described.

"doing this to entity X stop that from entity X" "no, look, here is another entity Y where didn't do this, and it still does that"

If anything your comment implies we should sanction all of these countries too.

It's pretty simple really:

- Sanctions don't achieve the goal of stopping funding terrorism as evident by it still happening.

- IF the point of sanctions was to _actually_ stop terrorism funding, you'd start at the origin of where these ideas start, which is known to be Wahhabism/Salafism.

- At least, you'd start at the origin of how people holding these ideas were supported and given weapons and training to achieve regime change goals and to fight against Russians in Afghanistan.

One thing to keep in mind Iranian leaders are mostly conservative Shiites. As such you are never going to get them to stop supporting Shiite communities in the middle east. Even if they disappeared tomorrow whoever replaces them is also not going to stop. And as Shiites they want nothing to do with Wahhabism/Salafism.

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