00:00the iranians had a deliberate policy that they called simulated irrationality in which they
00:05want simulated irrationality it's essentially their version of madman theory in which they on
00:10the one hand wanted to make sure that they were seen as somewhat irrational because if you're
00:15irrational the other side has a greater difficulty calculating what your next move is this is again
00:20what nixon did but they called it simulated irrationality at the core of it they're extremely
00:24calculating and extremely rational the israelis pushed the united states to sanction iran already
00:29in the early 1990s because they saw iran emerging as a rival to israel in the region prior to that
00:36they had actually had a long history of collaborating with iranians and having a tacit partnership and
00:40alliance but if you want to destroy and weaken a country you can do so by bombing them which is
00:46what
00:46we saw here and you can also do so by having decades of sanctions on them that slowly but surely
00:52suffocate
00:52them destroy their industries etc and this is what we saw in iraq this is what we're seeing in cuba
00:57right
00:57now so that type of a sanction even though the iranians have managed to resist it even as the
01:03russians currently are resisting a lot of these different sanctions over time it destroys this
01:07fabric of society in iraq there was actually a study by the state department i think from 2004
01:14as the u.s discovered how difficult it is to govern that country and they did a study to try
01:19to better
01:19understand where the roots of the problems were and one of the chapters dealt with the years of
01:24sanctions that had been imposed on iraq and it pointed out that iraq's economy under saddam hussein
01:29and the sanctions had shrunk to no more than 16 billion dollars total total and as a result you had
01:36a situation in which the incentive structure for ordinary people to even send girls to schools was no
01:42longer there what was the point of educating the children when there is no economy so you had a
01:46plummeting of uh literacy in iraq particularly amongst the female population so you tell me how can you
01:53actually transition a country towards democracy when you have rising illiteracy and this is iraq a
01:58country that historically has been the center of education and literacy in the arab world 50 of all
02:05books in arabic used to be printed in iraq it's a long long history that even precedes the arrival of
02:11iraq islam in iraq so sanctions slowly but surely destroys the
02:14you
