US taking millions of Iranians hostage to its ‘geopolitical agenda’: Analyst
Washington plans to keep the “murderous sanctions” against Iran’s peaceful nuclear programs and take millions of Iranians hostage to its geopolitical agenda, says a political commentator.

Bill Dores, a writer for Struggle/La Lucha and longtime antiwar activist, made the comment in an interview with Press TV on Thursday as he was speaking about Iran’s opposition to a step-for-step return to the 2015 nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), that was signed between Iran and six world powers — the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany.

Iran has on several occasions maintained that the country only accepts the lifting of sanctions in a verifiable manner before returning to full compliance with the multilateral agreement.

Speaking to Press TV on the condition of anonymity, a senior security official said the new US administration has failed to lift the sanctions that the ex-team at the White House imposed on Iran after leaving the JCPOA in May 2018, and that the only way for Tehran to return to its JCPOA commitments is for Washington to lift all the sanctions.

The officials said Iran will not hold any official or unofficial talks with the US before the removal of sanctions, adding that Iran will take further steps away from its commitments under the deal in the near future should the sanctions not be lifted.

“The position of the Islamic Republic regarding negotiations with the United States is completely right and justified,” Dores told Press TV on Thursday.

“US sanctions on Iran are a crime against humanity. They have taken the lives of tens of thousands of people by denying them medicine,” he noted. “The US is using the ill-gotten power of the dollar to inflict collective punishment on the ordinary people of Iran, on the sick, the elderly, the disabled, children.”

Dores pointed to US envoy Richard Nephew’s statement of US objective for anti-Iran sanctions and said, “Washington was holding the people of Iran hostage to its geopolitical agenda.”

Defining the US geopolitical agenda, the political analyst said, “It is for Iran to cease to exist as an independent country. The US is setting ridiculous preconditions it knows Iran can never accept as an excuse to maintain the murderous sanctions.”

Dores said, in making these demands, US President Joe Biden and Congress are “dancing to the tune of US energy monopolies and bankers who want to strangle Iran, who want to keep Iran’s oil and gas off the market. That’s what the nuclear issue is really about.”

“They want to return to the time when a few Western oil majors controlled 90 percent of the world’s oil production, when the Shah of Iran paid tribute to Wall Street. To this end, they are colluding with the racist state of Israel and the corrupt monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula,” he stressed.

The future of the JCPOA has been in doubt since May 2018, when the US under ex-president Donald Trump pulled out of the agreement and imposed the “toughest ever” sanctions on Iran as part of his so-called “maximum pressure,” which tried in vain to force Iran back to the negotiating table for talks on a “better deal.”

Despite throwing verbal support behind the JCPOA, the European parties to the deal — France, Britain and Germany — ultimately succumbed to Washington’s pressure and failed to fulfill their contractual commitments to Tehran, mainly by confronting the American sanctions.

That promoted Tehran to begin a set of retaliatory measures in several stages as part of its legal rights stipulated in Articles 26 and 36 of the JCPOA. The latest such measure was the halt in the implementation of the Additional Protocol to the NPT Safeguards Agreement, which was required by the parliament-adopted law.