Trita Parsi

That's before $300 billion of damage was inflicted on them as a result of this war.

Beyond the loss of human life, but you're also talking about infrastructure, their steel industry, the petrochemical industry are taking huge hits.

So this is gonna be very difficult for them.

So they need sanctions relief.

Look, the Israelis pushed the United States to sanction Iran already in the early 1990s, because they saw Iran emerging as a rival to Israel in the region.

Prior to that, they had actually had a long history of collaborating with Iranians and having a tacit partnership and alliance.

But if you wanna destroy and weaken a country, you can do so by bombing them, which is what we saw here.

And you can also do so by having decades of sanctions on them that slowly but surely suffocate them, destroy their industries, et cetera.

And this is what we saw in Iraq.

This is what we're seeing in Cuba right now.

So that type of a sanction, even though the Iranians have managed to resist it, even as the Russians currently are resisting a lot of these different sanctions, over time, it destroys this fabric of society.

In Iraq, there was actually a study by the State Department, I think from 2004,

as the US discovered how difficult it is to govern that country.

And they did a study to try to better understand where the roots of the problems were.

And one of the chapters dealt with the years of sanctions that had been imposed on Iraq.

And it pointed out that Iraq's economy under Saddam Hussein and the sanctions had shrunk to no more than $16 billion.

Total?

Total.

And as a result, you had a situation in which the incentive structure for ordinary people to even send girls to schools was no longer there.

What was the point of educating the children when there is no economy?