Sanctions are, in reality, part of the war machine: Howard

PeaceQuest Cape Breton’s Sean Howard takes on the issues of sanctions in his new column for the Cape Breton Spectator. Howard says sanctions have a long history of causing needless suffering.

“Decoupled from armed conflict, though still causing extreme suffering, the polite word for such sieges is ‘sanctions.’ Often invoked as a wise, humane alternative to war, they are in reality part of the war machine, vicious instruments of ‘statecraft’ which have proven particularly dangerous in American hands,” he writes.

Howard notes that in mid-February, foreign policy progressive Peter Beinart – stating bluntly that “the United States doesn’t just bomb its enemies. It chokes them.” – argued that, “for decades,” Washington “has supplemented its missile strikes and Special Operations with a less visible instrument of coercion and death,” blockading “weaker enemies” and “choking off their trade with the outside world.”

The United States doesn’t just bomb its enemies. It chokes them.

Peter Beinart

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK: Women for Peace, and Nicolas J.S. Davies, author of Blood on Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq, recently posed a morally momentous question: would Biden “end America’s Global War on children?”

As Benjamin and Davis write, you can “wage war on children” not only with “bombs, missiles, and bullets” but “in ways that disproportionately affect” them, “preventing countries like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea from importing essential food or medicines or obtaining the resources they need to buy them.”

Read more of “The Truth About Sanctions” by Sean Howard, published this month in the Cape Breton Spectator.