| Dealing with Iran | | Monday, 8 April 2013 | | by Richard Sawaya | In the remarkable and riveting Israeli documentary, "The Gatekeepers," constructed around interviews with six former heads of Shin Bet, Ami Ayalon – recipient of the medal of valor, Israel's highest decoration; head of the Israeli Navy, who accepted the Shin Bet post only after Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, serving from 1996 through 2000 – paraphrases Von Clausewitz: "Victory is the creation of a new political reality."
He is commenting, as his five comrades do in their ways, on the paradox that has prevailed since the outcome of the 1967 war; that since Rabin's assassination, the series of tactical "successes" effected by Shin Bet in responding to terrorism and implementing occupation of the conquered territories has afforded successive Israeli governments the means to avoid a strategic agreement regarding a Palestinian state.
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| Rethinking Economic Sanctions: The Emperor Has No Clothes? | | Thursday, 14 February 2013 | | by Richard Sawaya | The financial bubble blowout of 2008 dealt a self-inflicted body blow to the U.S. economy. We avoided a collapse of the financial system by means of federal government intervention just in time. Many Americans do not realize the material calamities they were spared.
Over the past several years, Congress has enacted – and the Administration has multilaterally implemented – the equivalent of a financial system meltdown on the Islamic Republic of Iran and on Syria, by means of sanctions targeting the countries' financial systems. We do so to compel Iran's leaders to forego nuclear weapons and Syria's to accept regime change.
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| Enough is Enough on Iran Sanctions | | Tuesday, 31 July 2012 | | by Richard Sawaya | The politics driving Congress to pass yet another Iran sanctions bill defy Einstein's definition of insanity.
Previously, sanctions advocates have asserted the existing sanctions are intended to compel Iran's rulers to stand down their nuclear program. That has not happened. Now, the same voices declare that the existing sanctions must be strengthened to exclude Iran entirely from the global financial system and to mount a comprehensive embargo on the sale and movement of Iranian crude oil exports. This, not to achieve a negotiated success vis a vis the nuclear issue, but to cripple Iran's economy, so that the Iranian people under such hardship will overthrow their rulers. That will not happen either. | | Read More >> | | | |
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