Subject: [SocialistWorker.org] Sanctions on Iran are killing children
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View original article here:
http://socialistworker.org/blog/critical-reading/2012/08/15/sanctions-iran-are-killing-chi
Critical reading [1]: A SocialistWorker.org blog
======== SANCTIONS ON IRAN ARE KILLING CHILDREN ==============================
August 15, 2012 12:28 am CDT
The barbarity of US foreign policy. More here [2]. --PG
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.... Taking It Out on the Kids (Again) [5]
Source: This Can't Be Happening
*US Sanctions on Iran are Hurting the Young and the Sick*
Sun, 08/12/2012 - 12:20
by: Dave Lindorff
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright should be a happy camper:
Another campaign of sanctions and embargoes by the US is about to start
killing children, this time in Iran.
Albright, as President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, when interviewed
on CBS’s news magazine program “60 Minutes” back in 2000, was asked by
reporter Lesley Stahl about reports that US sanctions on Iraq had led to the
deaths of some 500,000 Iraqi children because of shortages of medicine and
things like chlorine for treating water supplies. Stahl asked Albright if
such a dreadful toll was “worth it.” Albright famously responded [6],
“I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is
worth it.”
Albright must be happy then that apparently the same kind of heartless logic
is at work once more, this time orchestrated by the Obama administration and
the current Secretary of State, /It Takes a Village/ author and self-styled
child advocate Hillary Clinton.
According to a letter sent to UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon by the head of
Iran’s Charity Foundation for Special Diseases, the current US-led
sanctions campaign against Iranian financial institutions and efforts to
prevent western banks from doing business with Iran have made it next to
impossible for Iranian doctors and hospitals to obtain medicines from abroad
for such relatively rare but serious diseases as hemophilia, Multiple
sclerosis (MS), various cancers, kidney failure and thalassemia.
The tightening of international screws on Iranian financial transactions has
also made it hard for domestic makers of some of these medicines in Iran to
obtain the raw materials needed to manufacture needed medicines locally,
according to the letter.
Fatemeh Hashemi Rafsanjani, the author of the letter, called on the secretary
general to act to prevent the sanctions campaign from harming an estimated 6
million Iranians who suffer from these diseases. She said that the sanctions
had already “directly affected the lives and well-being of thousands of
patients.”
The US-led campaign to squeeze Iran economically is an effort to pressure the
Iranian public to make their country’s leaders shut down a completely legal
effort to develop a domestic nuclear fuel enrichment program. Iranians
suffering from cancer, MS, kidney disease or other diseases -- many of them
children -- are reportedly being prevented from getting needed medicines
because of a fear by Israel and its backer, the US, that Iran’s nuclear
program might lead in the future to Iran’s developing a nuclear bomb
capability, becoming the second nuclear nation in the Middle East, ending
Israel’s nuclear monopoly. Although US intelligence services concede that
there is no evidence that Iran is currently trying to develop a nuclear bomb,
the possibility that this might happen in the future is apparently
justification enough for threatening the lives of critically ill Iranian
citizens.
The US sanctions on Iran will no doubt also create problems for victims of
Iran’s latest disaster -- a pair of earthquakes, 6.4 and 6.3 on the Richter
Scale, which struck in the country’s northwestern region Saturday, killing
several hundred people and leaving over 16,000 homeless. Hospitals, some of
them damaged, were reportedly overcrowded and were struggling to obtain
medicines. The US, through its USAID program, sent in a planeload of
supplies--bottled water, blankets “personal hygiene kits” -- to Tehran,
which Washington valued at $350,000, and also provided another $50,000
through the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, but that aid is a pittance
compared to the supplies that are being deliberately blocked by
sanctions-related constraints on Iranian international payments.
No one should be surprised by this ruthless victimization of children and the
sick by Washington in the name of /realpolitik/. In Cuba, following the
collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, there was an epidemic of
blindness [7] and vision damage among children because of the inability of
Cuba, the subject of a decades-long US trade embargo, to obtain necessary
food and especially vitamin A.
Secretaries of State Albright and Clinton probably both think that earlier
US-manufactured atrocity was also “worth it.”
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[1] http://socialistworker.org/blog/critical-reading
[2] http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/08/14-0
[3] https://twitter.com/#!/CriticalReading
[4] https://www.facebook.com/criticalreading
[5] http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1277
[6] http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1084/
[7] http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1346&dat=19930527&id=t70wAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Af0DAAAAIBAJ&pg=4853,4775930
