The Sanctions Are the War: Iran, Siege Economics, and This Week's Mutual Aid Requests

1,191 words

5–8 minutes

The Sanctions Are the War

If you only track wars by whether missiles are currently in the air, you’ll miss most of what empire actually does for a living. This week the US carried out a new round of strikes on Iran, hitting more than 80 targets, air defence systems, command networks, coastal radar, and dozens of small boats near the Strait of Hormuz, and in the same breath reimposed the oil sanctions it had only recently, briefly, lifted. Iran has called it a “clear violation” of the memorandum the two countries signed last month and promised a “crushing response.” Buyers of Iranian oil now have until 17 July to unwind their transactions or face secondary sanctions themselves. Watch how quickly the headlines move on to the missiles and skip past that sentence. The missiles get the airtime. The sanctions get the casualties.

Because that is what sanctions are, whatever bloodless bureaucratic language gets used to describe them: a siege conducted through banking software instead of checkpoints. Sanctions do not degrade a regime’s capacity to hold power; regimes with oil wealth and repressive apparatus tend to survive them fine. What sanctions degrade is a population’s capacity to buy insulin, import dialysis equipment, keep a currency stable enough that a salary still buys groceries by the end of the month. Making ordinary Iranians miserable enough to bear that political cost is the entire design. Cutting off oil revenue is deliberately engineered to make ordinary Iranians so miserable that the political cost of the regime’s positions becomes unbearable, and it is engineered by people who will never have to explain to a mother in Tehran why the medication she needs is suddenly unavailable at any price.

I don’t say this to launder the Iranian state, which has plenty of its own violence to answer for against its own people, Kurds, Baluch, women, dissidents, workers. Solidarity with ordinary Iranians has never required pretending their government is innocent. But there is a difference between critiquing a state and starving a population to punish it, and Western commentary collapses that distinction on purpose, every single time, because “sanctions” sounds so much cleaner than “siege.” The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil. Strip away the ideology talk and what’s left underneath is a fight over who gets to set the price of energy and who has to eat the consequences, and empire has decided, again, that the answer is: not us.

This is the same architecture as Gaza, as Sudan, as Congo, as the fuel riots in Jakarta; different theatres, same machine, extracting resources and disciplining anyone who threatens the terms of extraction, and calling the discipline “policy” so it never has to be called what it is. The people paying for this war will not be the ones who ordered the strikes or wrote the sanctions memo. They will be ordinary people absorbing the shock in their bodies, their currencies, their access to medicine, same as they always are. We can’t lift a siege from here. What we can do is keep the mutual aid network under this roof funded and moving, because every single person in the list below is also absorbing some version of the same extraction, just closer to home. Give directly. Boost past your feed. That’s the practice.

✨Mutual Aid Roundup✨

@wrzky @OshunThaGreat @broodcoffee @kshernandez @AnthonyJK @ellespeaks @lyrial @tiredpinklover @notkawaii_irl @magicalgrrrl

✨Palestinian Campaign Spotlight✨

Help Me Escape the Hell of Gaza, Ayham Needs You

Ayham is 18 and the sole provider for 12 people in Gaza — his own family and his martyred uncle’s family — after losing their home.
[View original post]

@ayham_ljboor2008

REDISTRIBUTE