The United States has had sanctions against Iran for ages now but India hasn’t been playing ball and now the federal government is threatening to declare war on one of supposed allies:
WASHINGTON: The Obama administration is threatening to impose sanctions on India over its continued economic ties with Iran amid disagreements between Washington and New Delhi over how much and how soon the latter is reducing oil imports from the (in US eyes) pariah nation.
India has “failed” to reduce its purchase of Iranian oil and if it doesn’t do so, President Barack Obama may be “forced” to impose sanction, unnamed administration officials were cited as telling Bloomberg wire service. A decision in this regard could come as early as June 28, they added, implicitly offering New Delhi a ten- week window to show a decline in Iranian oil imports.
I said threatening to declare war because sanctions are an act of war. When a country declares sanctions against another they are saying that they will not allow any business within the borders of the state declaring sanctions to trade with the state the sanctions are being declared against. Furthermore the state declaring sanctions is also stating that they are willing to use force to prevent, not only their own businesses from trading, but businesses in other country’s from trading with the target of the sanctions.
India isn’t rolling over and being a good little slave so we’re flexing our muscles. This is the United States foreign police, either do exactly what we tell you or you will suffer greatly. On top of the fact that sanctions are a declaration of war there is also the fact that it’s the people living in the country against who sanctions are being declare, people entirely uninvolved in the politics of the game, who suffer:
High rates of malnutrition, lack of medical supplies, and diseases from lack of clean water were reported during sanctions; at least some of these results were anticipated in advance of the imposition of sanctions.
The modern Iraqi economy had been highly dependent on oil exports; in 1989, the oil sector comprised 61% of the GNP. A drawback of this dependence was the narrowing of the economic base, with the agricultural sector rapidly declining in the 1970s. Some claim that, as a result, the post-1990 sanctions had a particularly devastating effect on Iraq’s economy and food security levels of the population.
Shortly after the sanctions were imposed, the Iraqi government developed a system of free food rations consisting of 1000 calories per person/day or 40% of the daily requirements, on which an estimated 60% of the population relied for a vital part of their sustenance. With the introduction of the Oil-for-Food Programme in 1997, this situation gradually improved. In May 2000 a United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) survey noted that almost half the children under 5 years suffered from diarrhoea, in a country where the population is marked by its youth, with 45% being under 14 years of age in 2000. Power shortages, lack of spare parts and insufficient technical know-how lead to the breakdown of many modern facilities.
To think the megalomaniac we have in the Oval Office won a Nobel Peace Prize shows how meaningless that prize really is.