A Call For No Iran Econ Sanctions

Before the [Iranian] revolution, American officials often urged the dictatorial shah to share power with the emerging middle class. The shah chose to ignore that advice, and Americans eventually stopped offering it. Now is the time to dust off such thinking and pursue a policy that targets economic support to our natural allies in Iran's economic center. Only a strong and stable middle class can ensure that Iran's inevitable winds of change do more than knock down a few trees - or produce another populist demagogue.

That's Afshin Molavi, writing in the NYTimes, which despite its flaws, is still influential with the inside the Beltway bunch. He raises the Cuban Embargo argument against America's efforts to control the Ahmadinejad regime through sanctions.

Molavi makes an obvious point that is key to the Bush GWOT strategy: It is better and often easier to force change from within through the fire of freedom than it is to force it from without through economic or military power.

He argues that Iran has a large, liberal, democratic middle class, and that they could emerge as a backlash to Ahmadinejad, who blasted the rights-oriented campaign of the reformists out of the water with his economic prosperity and anti-corruption campaign.

The Iranians got economic isolation and political repression instead. Molavi says the only hope for reform is to keep the middle class in touch with the outside world, so they can continue their move towards democracy.

But doing so would do nothing to contain Ahmadinejad, and he must be contained. That's why I've always been a fan of covert economics: Squeeze the government's economics while covertly feeding the ecomomics of those who would stand for free trade, free thought and freedom.

Sanctions are ugly. Sometimes, as with Castro, they don't work. Other times, as with Hussein, despite all the corruption of the oil-for-food program, it is evident that sanctions effectively stopped Hussein's military build up and increasingly turned his people against him.

Iran needs to be sanctioned, and we need to be smart about how we apply them, and who not to hurt through them.

h/t Real Clear Politics