These are the themes being heard incessantly in the Islamic Republic when the topic of sanctions comes up. The regime wants its public to believe that sanctions are doing no harm at all, but its wants to tell the world at large that sanctions are choking the country to death and harming every last citizen.
Adding to the logical confusion, last year then-Oil Minister Masud Mir-Kazemi announced that he was blacklisting all the foreign oil firms that are refusing to do business with Iran.
“If a company takes a stand against Iran, we will be forced to take that into consideration and put that company on a blacklist,” the Mehr news agency quoted Mir-Kazemi as saying. “They will no longer work in our country.”
In other words, any firm not able to work in Iran will not be able to work in Iran.
Such rhetoric has been flying hard and fast since President Obama signed a new sanctions bill into law July 1 of last year.
Iranian officials have been going before the cameras to dismiss the American sanctions as a joke. Mir-Kazemi said the new sanctions have had no impact at all on Iran. (He said that 13 days after Obama signed the law and no one disputed him since they hadn’t gone into legal effect yet.)
“The sanctions have even brought about a positive effect,” he said, “Now, we can rely on ourselves.” This has been the official refrain for decades.
But no American good deed can go unpunished, so officials are also talking about how bad the Americans are for helping Iran become self-reliant.
There have been numerous suggestions that Iran would take the United States to the International Court of Justice for violating international law in imposing sanctions. Iranian officials have raised that option for three decades, but have never done anything. It is sort of the Tehran version of the Washington refrain: “All options are on the table.”
The Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) ran an article one day that listed six international agreements that were violated by the United States in imposing sanctions. The one clear citation said, “Unilateral sanctions imposed by the US are blatant interference in Iranian internal and foreign affairs which run counter to Clause 7 of Article 2 of the UN Charter as well as Article 32 of the same Charter.”
Clause 7 of Article 2 states in full: “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter; but this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter VII.” This, of course, has nothing to do with American sanctions. Furthermore, the UN Security Council has invoked Chapter VII each time it has imposed sanctions.
Article 32 states in full: “Any Member of the United Nations which is not a member of the Security Council or any state which is not a Member of the United Nations, if it is a party to a dispute under consideration by the Security Council, shall be invited to participate, without vote, in the discussion relating to the dispute. The Security Council shall lay down such conditions as it deems just for the participation of a state which is not a Member of the United Nations.” Again, IRNA seems confused in asserting that this means the American sanctions violate the UN Charter.
The Islamic Republic declares almost everything the United States does to be a violation of international law and it constantly threatens to take Washington to court. But it has actually filed a suit in the world court against the United States only twice. It lost a suit against Washington demanding compensation for the U.S. Navy attack on two oil platforms in 1988, although the court also said the Americans should not have attacked the rigs. The second suit was over the shootdown of an Iran Air Airbus also in 1988. Iran withdrew that suit after the two countries negotiated a payment agreement.