C. S. Burks, Esq.

Economic sanctions against Iran will do nothing more than cause economic harm to the people we wish to help: the citizenry of Iran, the same citizenry that has been responsible for numerous protests across the Islamic Republic.

Clearly, the leadership of Iran is less than desirable, but establishing sanctions against Iran will do nothing to change the leadership of Iran. Economic sanctions will fail to bring about regime change in the same way they have failed to do so in Cuba and other such examples. Such sanctions, too, will fail to keep the Iranians from further developing nuclear technologies.

While an nuclear-armed Islamic Republic is less than desirable, there is nothing short of an invasion that could prevent such an occurrence. Invading Iran, of course, is just a bad idea. It will be like Iraq all over again. Our troops will not only have to attempt to defeat the Iranian armed forces; they would then have to deal with insurgencies in the same manner as in Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, we would be stuck in another decade-long war fighting people that want us out of their country. Further, not only would we have to continually deal with the problem of insurgencies, we would have to rebuild the nation that we just destroyed, establishing a new system of government.

The fact remains that economic sanctions, the cutting off of free trade, between ourselves and Iran simply will fail to bring about a desired end, as such sanctions have failed to do with other nations in the past. The best, and most unpopular solution at the moment, is to not only continue a system of free trade with Iran, but promote even greater free trade with the Islamic Republic.

Free trade promotes not only peaceful venture but will expose the people of Iran to the ideas of capitalism and freedom, which is what we should promote: capitalism, which is necessary for a free society to exist. Within Iran there is already an underground desire for a free society ready to take flight at any moment; free trade will strengthen the underground freedom movement, while sanctions will squeeze the life out of it.