US-Led Iran Sanctions Stoking Anti-American Sentiment

The US-led economic sanctions on Iran are ruining the economy and stoking anti-American sentiment, according to a Tehran-based journalist.

“Many people have taken on second, even third jobs,” reports Al Jazeera’s Soraya Lennie. “They’ve watched their savings disappear, critical medicines are getting harder to find, inflation is high, factories are closing. Basically, so many people are watching their futures vanish.”

The Iranian have a laundry list of reason to dislike the United States, from overthrowing their democratic government in 1953 and imposing a dictatorship to militarily surrounding their country and threatening constantly to join Israel in an unprovoked bombing campaign.

But now crippling sanctions are at the forefront of their grievances, especially since they have been imposed on Iran for a transgression of the Iranian government that even US intelligence admits has not taken place. The most recent National Intelligence Estimate concluded Iran has no nuclear weapons program.

“Pushing Iran, isolating the country and trying to cripple the country’s economy to stop it enriching uranium is isolating the wrong people: the educated, the pro-Western youth, most of whom don’t tend to cling to any revolutionary zeal, who are more likely to be seen at the Apple store than at any anti-US rally,” Lennie writes.

But these are the people the Obama administration is turning off. As one student told Lennie: “It’s just a vicious circle. His [Obama’s] rhetoric of change actually ended up with change for the worst.”