Hi, I think millions is a drastic overstatement here which undermines the rest of your (often legitimate) claims.
Also Israel seems to have fairly normal relations with many countries in the region, the difference seems to be they are "countries not publicly calling for the destruction of Israel".
I always have to bring up the sanctions on Iraq after Saddam was no longer our puppet. A UN report in the mid-1990s claimed US sanctions had killed 500,000 Iraqi children. Then UN ambassador and later Secretary of State Madeline Albright responded by saying "the price was wroth it" [2].
As for the Iran-Iraq war, there are many estimates of the total deaths (across both sides) exceeding a million eg [3].
[1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@trtworld/video/7615994489991122194
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1T5JRVR53Eo
[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/23/iran-iraq-war-...
In general, I don't find the argument that there were 38 million deaths from sanctions very convicing. That estimate is based on excess deaths and correlation. It is serious work. But it doesn't establish causal structure.
What I mean is, those studies don't have the power to distinguish between (regime -> sanctions -> deaths) vs (regime -> deaths + regime -> sanctions).
I would definitely agree that sanctions cost lives (e.g. unavailability of specialist medicines) but I don't see a specific mechanism whereby they cause "millions" of deaths without a complete failure of local governance.
These kind of statements make my blood curdle. Much like Iran today, Iraq back then posed no threat to the US. So when Albright made these calculations, that "as much as it pained her", those 500,000 dead Iraqi children were "worth it", as long as Iraq threatened its neighbors blah blah blah... she's was being very, very callous. A war criminal wouldn't have said it better.
"I'm willing to sacrifice children from some other country, as long as our military objectives are met, for the greater good!".
I wonder if Albright would have made the same calculus were those children from her home town.
Also, this in my mind goes to show this isn't a partisan issue. Democrats/Republicans, they are all pretty callous with wars in foreign lands. Trump is just very obnoxious about it, and pretty bad at planning, but they are all universally terrible.
We overthrew their democratically elected government to install the Shah as a puppet dictator because the British goaded us into it by hand-waving about "communism" after Iran nationalized their own oil reserves from the Anglo-Iranian Company (which became BP). What followed was a brutal era of repression where American companies took a slice of oil revenue.
Once this became untenable, another of our puppets, Saddam Hussein, ejected the future Ayatollah Khomenei from Iraq in 1978. Why? Because we wanted the religious fundamentalists to win instead of the communists, which might bring Iran into the Soviet sphere of influence.
we then propped up a decade of war with Iraq by supplying Iraq with weapons. More than a million people died.
Iran has weathered decades of sanctions, which is a fancy way of saying "we're going to starve you and deny your citizens basic medical care". The death toll for this is also likely in the millions.
We've let our rabid attack dog in the region, Israel, bomb Iranian consulates (eg Damascus), assassinate scientists, diplomators and negotiators, bomb them with impunity and otherwise commit regular war crimes.
We've gone to war for no other reason than Israel wants Iran to be a fail-state because it threatens the Greater Israel project [1]. It's clear that there was no military planning in any of this or, more likely, military planners probably said "this is a bad idea, we can't win" and they were ignored.
Iran continued complying with the JCPOA for at least a year after Trump cancelled it at the behest of Sheldon Adelson [2].
All of this while Saudi Arabia, our "ally", provided material suport to the 9/11 hijackers [3]. Our attack dog spies on us. A lot eg Jonathon Pollard [4]. And Jeffrey Epstein was almost certainly a Mossad access asset that compromised every level of our government, our companies and our educational institutions.
We are the bad guys here and I hope one day Iran gets some justice for the harm we've inflicted upon it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Israel
[2]: https://fpif.org/these-three-billionaires-paved-way-for-trum...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_Saudi_role_in_the_Sept...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard