Juan Cole: Netanyahu Slips, Reveals Reason for Opposition to Iran Deal

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/04/07/netanyahu-slips-reveals-reason-opposition-iran-deal

In other words, Netanyahu wants to keep Iran poor and undeveloped. He wants to make sure that “crippling” sanctions aren’t lifted. He wants to keep Iranians in grinding poverty.

Is it true that the Iranian state would not spend the money that it garnered through a lifting of sanctions on schools or hospitals?

Look, I am no fan of the Islamic Republic or its system of government or its censorship and authoritarianism. But let us say that Netanyahu, in standing for permanent military rule over 4 million stateless Palestinians, and in launching disproportionate military campaigns with disregard for non-combatant life, is not obviously superior.

And, as far as social spending goes, Iran is in principal as progressive as Israel, though not as rich per capita. The Iranian state has built enormous numbers of schools since 1979, especially in rural areas, and [pdf] has brought literacy among the over-15 population from 65% in 1990 to 90% today. In the 15-25 age group, literacy is fully 98% and there are nearly 4 million university students. Iran has done better in educating its women than most other Middle Eastern countries, and a majority of Iranian college students is women.

<snip>

As for health care, Iran has universal health care, unlike the USA, and it is mandated in the Iranian constitution. The Islamic Republic has spent substantial sums making it more available to the population, including in previously neglected rural areas. Crippling sanctions over the long term would certainly pose severe health risks to ordinary Iranians.

So it simply is not true that the Iranian state does not spend on schools and hospitals, as Netanyahu alleged. His purpose in making this false claim is to deflect an obvious critique of “crippling” sanctions, which is that they harm ordinary people, not just the state.

[2naSalit]

1. Well...

that and to deflect scrutiny of his failures as a human being and how he is treating people in Palestine. I suspect that all this issue will do for him is expose his sense of inhumanity.

[freshwest]

2. Iran needs its healthcare infrastructure to continue caring for the thousands permanently disabled

by Saddam's nerve gas attacks. It affected those from birth onward and it is a huge responsibility that shows, despite all the intrigues arising from Iran, there are people there with good hearts. That is true of every nation. The denial of care for them is genocidal. While Israel or Netanyahou, who does not represent all the people in the country have concerns about the genocidal rantings from the Ayatollahs, I don't think any fair minded person approves of adding insult to injury for those maimed by the actions of Saddam, who also attacked Israel with SCUDs during the Kuwaiti conflict, which some seem to have forgotten. The record of warfare of some of the worst kind in that region goes back into ancient times. I'm glad this story is coming out, not to bash Israel, but to show the Iranians do have something to lose. They also, are not brain dead fanatics. The world needs less of that kind of people and more people who care about each other - and we are all part of the other.

[oberliner]

3. "He wants to keep Iranians in grinding poverty."

Actually, he wants to get them to not be able to spend hundreds of millions of dollars arming Hamas.

If Iran wasn't the primary supporter of money and arms to Hamas (and Hezbollah) then he wouldn't really particularly care.

Juan likes to make it seem like Israelis just do these things for kicks.

Is there a way to harm the state without harming ordinary people?

Sanctions is generally the go-to approach for the international community in situations like this.

[eridani]

4. Arming Hamas is chickenshit

You'd think that Hamas could afford better than tin can toy rockets, and at least get the death toll even instead of 20 Palestinians for every Israeli. Hezbollah is the only political party in Lebanon capable of mounting some sort of defense to Israel's attacks. Did Iran occupy Lebanon for 20 years, or destoy its infrastructure in 2006? The money they send to Hezbollah is in service of a very good cause.

Lebanon's shock resistance went beyond protest. It was also expressed through a far-reaching parallel reconstruction effort. Within days of the cease-fire, Hezbollah's neighborhood committees had visited many of the homes hit by the air attacks, assessed the damage and were already handing out $12,000 in cash to displaced families to cover a year's worth of rent and furnishings. As the independent journalists Ana Nogueira and Saseen Kawzally observed from Beirut, "That is six times the dollar amount that survivors of Hurricane Katrina received from FEMA." And in what would have been music to the ears of Katrina survivors, the Hezbollah leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, promised the country in a televised address, "You won't need to ask a favor of anyone, queue up anywhere." Hezbollah's version of aid did not filter through the government or foreign NGOs. It did not go to build five-star hotels, as in Kabul, or Olympic swimming pools for police trainers, as in Iraq. Instead, Hezbollah did what Renuka, the Sri Lankan tsunami survivor, told me she wished someone would do for her family: put the help in their hands. Hezbollah also included community members in the reconstruction—it hired local construction crews (working in exchange for the scrap metal they collected), mobilized fifteen hundred engineers and organized teams of volunteers. All that help meant that a week after the bombing stopped, the reconstruction was already well under way.

In the U.S. press, these initiatives were almost universally derided as bribery or clientelism—Hezbollah's attempt to purchase popular support after it had provoked the attack from which the country was reeling (David Frum even suggested that the bills Hezbollah was handing out were counterfeit). There is no question that Hezbollah is engaged in politics as well as charity, and that Iranian funds made Hezbollah's generosity possible. Equally important to its efficiency, however, was Hezbollah's status as a local, indigenous organization, one that rose up from the neighborhoods being rebuilt. Unlike the alien corporate reconstruction agencies imposing their designs from far-off bureaucracies via imported management, private security and translators, Hezbollah could act fast because it knew every back alley and every jury-rigged transmitter, as well as who could be trusted to get the work done. If the residents of Lebanon were grateful for the results, it was also because they knew the alternative. The alternative was Solidere.

pp 460-62 in the hardcover edition of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

[geek tragedy]

5. The international sanctions are in relation to the nuclear program, not the

arming of violent non-state actors.

So he's playing Calvinball.