Coronavirus epidemic decrease the probability of war; U.S Professor
“Although medicine is supposed to be exempted from the sanctions, companies who want to sell medicine to Iran cannot find a major bank that will process the payments,” an anthropologist at George Washington University told ILNA.
Speaking to ILNA news agency in an exclusive interview, the U.S Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs Hugh Gusterson said that the banks are all afraid of U.S. retaliation for doing what is allowed under international law.
Refereeing to the article in Reuters that mentioned medicines are supposed to be exempted from the sanctions, he added “Yet it does not seem to be working out that way. In particular, there is a shortage in Iran of specialized medicines needed to treat rare illnesses.”
The Professor who his work focuses on nuclear culture, international security, confirmed “This repeats Iraq's experience in the 1990s when sanctions were supposed to exempt medicine, but did not. Many public health experts believe this resulted in the deaths of many Iraqis, especially children.”
“It is my own opinion that sanctions should never have been reimposed,” adding that at the time they were reimposed, Iran was found to be in compliance with the JCPOA by international inspectors, so there was no legitimate reason to reimpose sanctions.
“Donald Trump reimposed them as a way of making Iran agree to renegotiate the terms of the JCPOA,” Gusterson told.
He pointed to the spread of coronavirus in all countries and said “Although the coronavirus epidemic in the U.S. is not nearly as bad (yet) as that in Iran, it has thrown the Trump Administration into crisis, and it is threatening to plunge the U.S. into recession.
“This will absorb all the attention of U.S. leaders for the foreseeable future, and they will be too distracted to get into a war,” he said.
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