In January, Donald Trump took to Twitter to address the “brave, long-suffering people of Iran: I’ve stood with you since the beginning of my Presidency, and my Administration will continue to stand with you.”
He went on: “The noble people of Iran — who love America — deserve a government that’s more interested in helping them achieve their dreams than killing them for demanding respect.”
Trump certainly has an interesting way of showing his solidarity — particularly in the era of coronavirus, when he’s been even more complicit in killing the Iranians he’s allegedly helping.
As of Tuesday, the country had roughly 25,000 confirmed cases and nearly 2,000 deaths. The Iranian health ministry reports that one person is dying of coronavirus every ten minutes. And yet the Trump administration has found the moment opportune to ramp up its economic assault on Iran, where years of US sanctions have already devastated the Iranian health care system.
As Human Rights Watch (HRW) noted last October, sanctions had “drastically constrained the ability of the country to finance humanitarian imports, including medicines, causing serious hardships for ordinary Iranians and threatening their right to health.” Among those especially affected were patients with leukemia, epilepsy, and eye injuries owing to “exposure to chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war” of 1980–88 (another period of mass suffering in which the United States was more than slightly culpable, including, as it happens, on the chemical weapons front).
But, hey, so what if the shortage of medicine and equipment prevents Iran from effectively fighting coronavirus? It’s not like global pandemics affect the whole world.
The United States insists that humanitarian assistance to Iran is not prohibited by sanctions. But as HRW found, supposed humanitarian exemptions “have failed to offset the strong reluctance of US and European companies and banks to risk incurring sanctions and legal action by exporting or financing exempted humanitarian goods.”
If that wasn’t enough evidence, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s admission that the United States is engaged in straight-up collective punishment in Iran — in order to “lead the Iranian people to rise up and change the behavior of the regime” — would seem to indicate that humanitarianism is not at all the name of the game. War crimes, more like it. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.