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Stephen Gottlieb: Peace And Penalties

A recent email from Tom Huf struck me as a clear and succinct statement about the problem with American policy toward Iran. Tom, like my wife and myself, was a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran, and follows developments in Iran closely. Here’s what he wrote:

I’ve been thinking recently that the whole US premise – even among non-Trumpians – of trying to isolate and punish Iran and dump onto Iran the ills of the region[,] is the best way to make the situation worse. Have we not learned the lessons of the Treaty of Versailles? Isolation, blame mongering, and punitive financial payment regimes did not work out so well after punishing Germany in 1919. Pretending that containing and even diminishing Iran will yield good results is absurd. Unreality, unbalanced dealing, and ignoring 80 million people injects instability and can only end badly.

Let me unpack Tom’s comments. The First World War ended with the Treaty of Versailles in which the victors imposed reparations payments on Germany, bankrupting it. One might be tempted to cheer but Germany was so weakened that unemployment there exceeded our own in the Great Depression of 1929 through the 1930s. The damage to ordinary Germans, left many prey to what they imagined as the promise of Hitler, re-establishing the honor of Germany and their place in it. Many have pinned Hitler’s emergence on both the injury to Germany’s workers and Germany’s honor.

So Tom’s basic point is that punishment can go too far – in the case of Germany spawning the downfall of its democratic Weimar Constitution, Hitler’s rise to power, and his war for world conquest which cost somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty million lives. Tom’s argument, which I join, is that just penalizing or making a pariah out of Iran is a very dangerous as well as unproductive strategy.

Iran does have the ability to cause trouble all over the world especially by covert or fifth-column activities. But most of the terrorist damage to us – ISIS, al-Qaeda etc. – have been from Sunni organizations, largely funded and supported by Iran’s opponents in Middle-Eastern politics. Isolating and diminishing Iran would increase the threat from the violent offshoots of militant Wahhabi Islam by making Iran less of a player. Similarly, when the Bush Administrations took Iraq down, our actions not only damaged Iraq but created a power vacuum in the Middle East, and removed a threat to Iran – who’d fought a very nasty war with Iraq that left more than a half million dead and double that number of casualties. W. didn’t say he was fighting to give Iran more leverage, but he did. Defeating or further diminishing Iran would do that for Iran’s Sunni neighbors who’ve supported ISIS and al-Qaeda. We wouldn’t call that our objective, but it’s an obvious result.

I don’t agree with Tom’s further suggestion that something like the Marshall plan, with aid from the U.S., would fly or even make sense of the current Middle East, but there are certainly ways to shape our relations with the countries of that part of the world in more constructive ways. In that respect, Tom is right on.

Penalties can be overdone. We’ve overdone it by over-criminalizing drugs, with unwarranted and destructive mass incarceration of African-Americans, and by channeling money for prisons that would have been more productively used for education. Tom hit the nail on the head – by over-using penalties in foreign relations, we’ve probably shot ourselves, not in the foot, but in more vital organs.

Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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