The U.S. Must Stop Strangling Innocent People Around the World

This is what always happens when the U.S. uses the economic weapon against other countries.

Anchal Vohra writes about the effects of pointless U.S. and other Western sanctions on Syria:

The country’s economy collapsed as a result of devastation caused by war, decades-long corruption by the Assad government, and the crash of the banking sector in Lebanon, in which not just Lebanese but Syrians too lost their deposits. But Western sanctions that banned reconstruction of any sort, including of power plants and pulverized cities, certainly exacerbated Syrians’ miseries and eliminated any chance of recovery. 

Syria sanctions are part of a pattern of U.S. economic warfare that inflicts even more damage on countries that are already suffering greatly. Like the “maximum pressure” campaign on Venezuela and the policy decisions that have effectively cut Afghanistan off from the rest of the world, broad sanctions on Syria worsen already bad conditions. They further punish a population that has had to endure a decade of conflict and dislocation. This is not a “side effect” or an unforeseeable consequence of imposing sanctions. Hurting the population is what these sanctions are designed to do, and there is no way that broad sanctions wouldn’t hurt the population.