Corruption, Not American Sanctions, Are the Cause of Iran’s Current Woes

“Show Mercy, Mr. Trump” reads the headline of a recent New York Times editorial urging the U.S. government to ease sanction on the Islamic Republic, which is suffering severely from the coronavirus pandemic. While many Iranians are indeed having trouble obtaining medicines, the problem, Alireza Nader explains, is corruption rather than American policies:

Health Minister Saeed Namaki has continually reported that Iran is doing just fine when it comes to supplies of medicine. At the height of the pandemic, Namaki said that “although it is hard to fight the coronavirus under sanctions, since the beginning [of the outbreak] we have not faced a shortage of special drugs needed to treat this disease.”

In some respects, this should not be surprising, since U.S. law ensures that Washington’s sanctions on Iran do not prohibit trade in food or medicine. European trade data show that Iran’s pharmaceutical imports remained robust in 2019 despite the return of sanctions. And regime insiders such as the chairman of the Iran-Switzerland Chamber of Commerce have admitted that mechanisms such as the Swiss Humanitarian Trade Arrangement allow the import of humanitarian goods without hindrance from U.S. sanctions.

So why are there still shortages? Namaki warned lawmakers that corrupt networks are selling drugs on the black market, “hoarding medicines in warehouses, and distributing counterfeit drugs.” The health minister also blasted “a highly complicated network” within the government responsible for systemic corruption and theft, including the hoarding of “millions of antiviral masks.”

Such problems affect every sector of Iran’s economy. . . . Theft is what feuding [Iranian] politicians have in common, regardless of the faction with which they are aligned. . . . U.S. and European leaders should bear this corruption in mind as regime officials such as Foreign Minister Javad Zarif seek to play on Western guilt to secure sanctions relief.

Read more at FDD

More about: Donald Trump, Iran, Iran sanctions, U.S. Foreign policy

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF