[rmnunez]

Sanctions are a step taken only because critical lefties are so strongly opposed to war conservatives who cannot resolve things diplomatically try this to see if they can do any better.

Invariably sanctions don't work because they take too long. Additionally they will always produce hardship for many more than the decisionmakers they are aimed at influencing. Another important difficulty with sanctions is that they are supposed to induce sufficient discomfort for the population to pressure its government to do something to avoid them, but most often are applied to regimes which are not at all responsive to popular pressures.

Look at the countries currently labouring under the most draconian sanctions: Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and then a few others. These governments are repressive, if their citizens complained about any hardships from sanctions, they're likely to be shot, so there won't be much pressure on Castro, Kim or the Ayatollah. Sanctioned governments are usually quite corrupt and their leadership, by virtue of all it has looted, is immune from any hardship due to sanctions.

But we can't just move from failed diplomacy directly to war, the critical left won't tolerate this, so we've got to try the economic sanctions route to see if that will work. Naturally, the critical left will gripe about how ineffective the sanctions are and how the people are made to suffer, but so what, nobody believes these sanctions can work anyway, they are just done because diplomacy failed and we can't go to war without something more.