Sanctions on Iran are Working, Preventing War

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Feeling bad for the Iranian people who are enduring hardship wrought by the West’s economic sanctions, but the majors demos in Tehran today–inveighing against the Ahmadinejad government and religious establishment–show the whole sanctions policy is working. President Obama has insisted they be given a chance to work, and he’s being proven correct. Mitt, Bibi, and other wingers all look silly, having insisted on imminent war. Even Bibi is now altering his stance to favor sanctions. The mullahs have a growing currency crisis on their hands, while the cost of consumer goods has increased four-fold. Instability is brewing. Sanctions that result in curtailment of their nuclear ambitions are a far better option than bombing. Painful though the sanctions are for Iranians, the people are taking their anger out on the regime, where it belongs for their autocratic rule.

Think my outlook is too rosy? Read what Tod Robberson, editorial writer at the Dallas Morning News published yesterday:

“Mitt Romney and his pal, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, face an increasingly uphill battle arguing that the tough sanctions regime put in place by the Obama administration isn’t working. The pressure on Iran’s government to cease its uranium-enrichment program and abide by its international treaty obligations has never been more severe than it is today.

The value of Iran’s currency, the rial, is in free fall. According to Reuters, the rial reached a record low value of 37,500 to the dollar on the free market. A week ago it traded at about 24,600. Between 2010 and 2011, the rial’s value remained relatively steady at between 10,300 and 10,800 to the dollar. According to one report, Iranians lost 660 trillion in rial-based assets because of the plummeting market. This marks an enormous financial crisis for the country.

Heck, things are so bad that, instead of sightseeing in New York last week, the Iranian delegation headed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went on a shopping trip to Costco to buy stuff like shampoo that they can’t get in their own country. One member of his delegation reportedly has defected.

What has happened since last year to make the currency plummet to less than half its 2011 value? Sanctions, that’s what. . . .

And now, there can be no argument that the sanctions are taking a steep toll on Iran’s government. This helps explain why Israel’s foreign ministry issued a report last week calling for the government to give sanctions more time — in spite of the constant drumbeat of war coming from Netanyahu and Romney.

Yes, Romney can ask for proof that Iran has curtailed its uranium enrichment program as a result, and that’s a fair question. The answer almost certainly is: There is no proof — yet. That’s what the sanctions are all about. At a certain point pretty soon, Iran’s isolation and economic strife are going to reach a breaking point, at which time Tehran will seriously enter negotiations on inspections and agree to international limits on its enrichment activities. Sure beats war.

Romney is going to have to come up with another argument heading into tomorrow’s debates. He can’t even rely on backing from Netanyahu, who appears to be backing away from the hard-line stance he had maintained barely three weeks ago. Read more on that at ForeignPolicy.com,” in a Joel Rubin story headlined Netanyahu Aligns with Obama on Iran.

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10 Years Later, Michael Bell Still on the Trail of New England’s Vampires

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One of the most unusual and fascinating books I edited and published in the seven years I was an editorial executive with Carroll & Graf (2000-07) was Food For the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires by folklorist Michael Bell. Over more than 20 years of research at the point the book was published in 2001, Michael had identified more than a dozen New England gravesites where, beginning in the late 1700s and continuing for at least 100 years, the relatives and neighbors of people who’d died from tuberculosis handled the cadavers and conducted their burial in a way that they imagined might diminish the chances of the disease being passed on to others. These funerary practices, at first inexplicable to moderns living with 20th century medicine, possessed a clear logic in an era when the notion of contagion was sensed but not formally known. They included burning some of the fleshly remains and inhaling the smoke from the resulting fire; feeding some of the burnt byproducts to the ill; and arranging the limbs of the dead in such a way as to thwart transmission of illness. Clearly, the grieving and anxious survivors hoped they could somehow inoculate themselves by taking these steps.

The book is a readable synthesis of fascinating stories combining literary lore from such authors as Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Amy Lowell, and Robert Frost, who retold and reimagined these vampire stories; medical anthropology; and travel tales, with Michael wandering from one corner of New England to another, always in search of more folklore on this surprising topic.

Though Michael’s book came out more than ten years ago, his investigation didn’t end with publication. In fact, according to a comprehensive article by Abigail Tucker in this month’s issue of Smithsonian, Michael has now documented more than eighty examples of these burials and exhumations, ranging beyond New England and stretching as far west as Minnesota. According to Tucker,

“Hundreds more cases await discovery, [the author] believes. ‘You read an article that describes an exhumation, and they’ll describe a similar thing that happened at a nearby town,’ says Bell, whose book, Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires, is seen as the last word on the subject, though he has lately found so many new cases that there’s a second book on the way. ‘The ones that get recorded, and I actually find them, are just the tip of the iceberg.’”

I remain fascinated by this topic, and am excited to have Smithsonian‘s update on Michael’s research, and to be reminded of the book that Michael Kenney in the Boston Globe described as an “Absorbing account [that] is neither Halloween fantasy nor tabloid frenzy, but a major contribution to the study of New England folk beliefs.” I’ll be interested to learn about the more recent cases that Michael has discovered in the decade since I published Food For the Dead with him, and eager to learn about the next book. Below are images of the front and back cover of the 2002 paperback edition.

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