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while (relatively) moderate civilian politicians are reduced to feuding and arresting each others' children. Iran's nuclear programme appears to proceed independent even of the organs of its own state.
A spoof article in the Economist last year portrayed Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, ruminating on western nations' obsessive posturing towards his country. He mused that these were unstable, unreliable places, dangerous though probably not all mad. But since it was hard to be sure, "I would feel a lot safer if we already had that bomb". Similar insecurity drove sanctioned Cuba to accept Russian missiles in the 1960s, and sanctioned Iraq and Libya to pretend to build weapons of mass destruction in the 1990s.
Sanctions never stop bad things happening. Rather they entrench dictators, build up siege economies and debilitate the urban middle class from which opposition to dictatorship grows. As Khamenei said in a speech a year ago, sanctions were "painful ... but make us more self-reliant". Indeed, for a regime to be sanctioned is to receive an elixir: witness Castro, Gaddafi, the ayatollahs and the ruling cliques of Burma, Afghanistan and North Korea. That sanctioned regimes sometimes come to an end is not proof that sanctions work, rather that they take a long time and usually require war to "work".
This is a rarely researched topic because sanctions are diplomatic ideology rather than science. A debate in 1998 in International Security magazine saw the Chicago academic, Robert Pape, barely challenged in his view that only around five of the 115 cases of sanctions imposed since the war could claim any plausible efficacy. Most merely inflicted "significant human costs on the populations of target states, including on innocent civilians who have little influence on their government's behaviour". They are a ready invitation to war.
When I was reporting on South Africa in the 1980s I became convinced that sanctions were aiding import substitution and benefiting the Afrikaner economy, probably giving apartheid an extra decade of life. They likewise prolonged Ian Smith's regime in Rhodesia. Sanctions made Libya's Gaddafi so rich he could spoon money into the London School of

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