IRAN IS WINNING - ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY ON TRIB EDITORIAL

Your November 12th editorial "Iran is winning" is particularly disturbing because it starts with a false premise and posits but two courses of action, both of which are not only doomed to failure, but likely to be self destructive.

The false premise is that Iran is building nuclear weapons, when in fact that is far from conclusive. Even if true, does it not dawn on the Trib editorial board that possible motivation for building nuclear weapons stems from the hundred or so Israeli nuclear weapons pointed at Iran; and that the US, with Trib backing, tends to only invade perceived unfriendly nations that don't have nuclear weapons? Check out our last three major interventions, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, and the pass given to North Korea, as evidence.

The two courses of action considered, military war on the Iranian government or economic war designed to collapse the Central Bank or Iran, should both be off the table instead of the only morsels on the Trib's menu.

The essence of your editorial was that collapsing the Central Bank of Iran is the only way to prevent Israel, with tacit US support, from launching a military strike against Iran. By so doing you pretend to take the high ground as the adults working furiously to avoid a self destructive shooting war.

But nowhere in your editorial to do consider that even cooler heads than yours have described collapsing the Iran's Central Bank the "nuclear option" because it could push an already teetering global economy over the edge while inflicting massive human suffering in Iran. While Senators like Mark Kirk and most of the GOP presidential field promote this idea, the real adults residing in the Obama Administration have pushed back arguing "such sanctions could disrupt oil markets and further damage US and world and world economies".

You would do well to consult with University of Chicago political scientist and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, Robert Pape, who offered the following against such sanctions at a recent congressional briefing:

"Imagine, if....the Iranians were..able to create a banking crisis in the US that made it impossible to cash our checks...I don't think it would make
us do what the Iranians wanted."

Professor Pape has extensively studied modern-day sanctions and found that they failed to achieve their objectives over 95% of the time since World War 1, and they are THREE TIMES more likely to end in a shooting war than in success.

Is the Trib editorial board aware that the Central Bank of Iran regulates Iranian currency, just as our Federal Reserve regulates the US dollar. Since central banks are accorded sovereign immunity, it can be argued that sanctioning the Central Bank of Iran violates international law and some Iranian officials have already stated that such sanctions on their Central Bank would be considered an act of war.

After sixty years of reading the Trib, going back to when Col. McCormick was still recovering from "Dewey Defeats Truman" and plotting to abolish the New Deal in his Wheaton lair just a short hike from where I write this, I will not give up encouraging the Trib editorial board to refrain from ginning up the next war, military or economic. But time is running out folks...so get with it.