Sanctions Are An Act of War

• Sanctions Are An Act of War
  by Jacob G. Hornberger, https://www.fff.org/blog
  If the Pentagon suddenly bombed North Korea, killing thousands of North Korean citizens, that would clearly be considered an act of war. Yet, when the U.S. government intentionally targets North Korea with economic sanctions that kill thousands of North Koreans through starvation or illness, that’s considered to be simply a peaceful diplomatic measure. That’s odd because from a practical standpoint, people are dead either way — from bombs or sanctions.
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  Americans have become so accustomed to the concept of sanctions that the policy has become hum-drum and commonplace. Since the violence associated with sanctions is indirect and difficult to see, people don’t put them in the same category as bombs. But the reality is that sanctions, by virtue of their targeting foreign citizens for death, are every bit an act of war as dropping bombs on them.
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  North Korea is quite possibly the most impoverished nation on earth. Suffering for decades under a brutal socialist economic system (one in which the government takes care of everyone with guaranteed retirement pensions, healthcare, education, employment, housing, and food), the populace is always starving or on the verge of starvation.
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  What do U.S. sanctions do? They make the economic suffering of the North Korean people even worse. And that’s what they are designed to do — to inflict maximum harm on North Koreans in the hopes of starving them and their children to death.
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  The idea is twofold: (1) If the North Koreans are dying or watching their children die, they will do what is necessary to oust the North Korean regime and replace it with a regime that is pro-U.S. or (2) the North Korean regime, faced with a rising death toll among the North Korean people from starvation of illness, will abdicate in favor of a pro-U.S. regime or simply agree to do the bidding of U.S. officials.
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  Either way, the North Korean people are the pawns in all this. They are the ones who are targeted for death by U.S. officials and their sanctions.
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  Of course, this is not the only time that U.S. officials have targeted the civilian populace of a nation as a way to achieve a political goal. Sanctions have become a popular foreign-policy tool of U.S. officials, especially against Third World nations, which lack the ability to retaliate.
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  Recall the U.S. regime-change operation in Chile from 1970 to 1973. Somehow concluding that the Chilean people’s election of a self-avowed Marxist as president was a threat to U.S. “national security,” U.S. officials targeted Chile for a U.S. regime-change operation. As part of the regime-change plan, the CIA did everything it could to make the Chilean economy “scream.”
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  What that meant was that the CIA secretly engaged in actions designed to bring maximum economic suffering to the Chilean people, including starvation, as reflected by a scheme by which the CIA secretly bribed the nation’s truckers into going on strike, thereby preventing the delivery of food to people all across the country. The idea was that by killing the Chilean people or their children, that would make them more amenable to a military coup, which ultimately came in 1973.
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  Recall the 11 years of brutal U.S. sanctions on Iraq. They targeted and killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. Yes, children, not one of whom ever initiated any violence against the United States. The goal? Again, regime change. The idea was that if the Iraqi people wanted to avoid the ever-increasing death toll of their children, they could oust Saddam Hussein from power and install a regime that was acceptable to U.S. officials. Alternatively, the idea was that Saddam Hussein, if he cared about the Iraqi children, would abdicate in favor of a pro-U.S. regime or simply agree to comply with U.S. dictates.
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