Children of Iran, December 2017. Wikicommons/ Mostafameraji. Some rights reserved.On Tuesday night, I was on the plane coming back from giving a talk, when Donald Trump announced his rejection of the Iran nuclear deal.
The subject of the talk, ironically, was the economic sanctions and the ordinary suffering of Iranians. With a few exceptions, which sadly did not lead to more persistent and lasting attention, mainstream and western media accounts of economic sanctions have presented the nuclear dispute with Iran in a narrow and exclusionary framework which has focused on questions of the level of uranium enrichment, and the constant question mark posed over Iran’s compliance.
Meanwhile whilst the technicalities are hotly debated, the pain and predicament of the bodies of ordinary Iranians bearing the weight of sanctions seems to have been either ignored and side-lined, or even worse, deemed as the necessity which facilitates optimal success.
