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Vince answered a question on Quora.
Do you think economic sanctions are immoral as they hurt the innocent? Vince Dhimos, Editor-in-Chief at New Silk Strategies (2016-present) Of course they are immoral. US-waged wars are also immoral. The harm sanctions cause in the Third World is far worse than Westerners imagine. The problem with US foreign policy is that the people who devise the policies are immoral and the US people do not make any moral challenges to the policies. If you read, for example, sites like the Atlancic Council (NATO mouthpiece), you will probably never find an article mentioning the word “moral” or “morality.” When a country abandons all notions of morality, the policies are not only amoral but quickly become immoral. This is reflected in the fact that US wars since WW II have so far slaughtered an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people, mostly civilians who were minding their own business, and sanctions have also killed countless thousands of innocents. The aftermath of the Iraq war left most of the country without electricity or drinking water. Under these conditions, people are forced to drink water from rivers, lakes and puddles left after rainfall. This means that most of the people who drink this water without boiling it first will get dysentery, which if left untreated (the sanctions also left them without medicine), also will kill the patient. The irony of all this is that most of the US population consider themselves Christian. But Christian ethics and morals are, for some reason, not applied by these Christians to politics, especially foreign policy. While some Christian groups oppose abortion on moral grounds, none of the groups that do so oppose the immoral US sanctions and war. It all seems kind of superficial. A very important fact is that the US waited 7 years after the end of the Iraq war in 2003 to lift the sanctions — in 2010. So what was their excuse I wonder? Did they think there were still WMDs? The Iraqi people had already suffered horribly during the war, mostly from US “humanitarian” bombing, which caused anywhere from 150,000 to 400,000 deaths (depending on who is doing the reporting), and then had to suffer 7 long years of excruciating sanctions. George Galloway said before the US Congress that 1 million Iraqis died as a result of sanctions. During the Syrian war (NOT a civil war. The fighters, mostly terrorists, came from over 80 countries), the US also imposed sanctions, and now that the war is mostly over, the US is forbidding all countries to help rebuild the mess caused by mostly the US, and the sanctions continue. Obviously there is no palpable morality in Washington. There is an unspoken racism and neo-colonialism in US policy as well. It is just the opposite of the foreign policies of Russia and China. A poll taken among young Arabs poll among young Arabs reflects a major loss of trust in the US and a major gain in trust of Russia among this group, which views the US as an enemy.
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