Our “economic war” on Iran is finally having an effect, said Bloomberg.com in an editorial. Strict sanctions by the West on Iran’s oil exports and banking industry—designed to dissuade Iran’s leaders from pursuing their nuclear program—have thrown the country’s economy into free fall. The value of the Iranian rial has plunged by 40 percent against the U.S. dollar in just two weeks, inflation is at 70 percent, and food is scarce and expensive. Iranians rioted outside Tehran’s shopping bazaar last week, and a “wave of strikes” has buffeted the country since the summer. There’s “increasing talk of a possible Persian Spring,” said the New York Daily News. Even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pushing for a new, more serious round of sanctions, rather than a military attack. Iran will escape this tightening vise only “after the mullahs step away from the enriched uranium.”
Don’t count on that happening, said Yousaf Butt in ForeignPolicy.com. The regime will never buckle to the West’s conditions, so the sanctions are really intended to put such crippling pressure on the starving Iranian people that they “demand regime change.” But ordinary Iranians blame the U.S. and the West for their current misery, not the regime. Besides, the ayatollahs care little about “domestic public opinion” or the hardships of their people, said Jonathan S. Tobin in CommentaryMagazine.com. These fanatics see the world in black-and-white, and they would view an abandonment of their nuclear program as a defeat. Only the likelihood of a military attack will deter them.
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