Iraq I will grant you, those sanctions were a travesty. Cuba bad too. In general, I don't find the argument that there were 38 million deaths from sanctions ve

Iraq I will grant you, those sanctions were a travesty. Cuba bad too. In general, I don't find the argument that there were 38 million deaths from sanctions very convicing. That estimate is based on excess deaths and correlation. It is serious work. But it doesn't establish causal structure. What I mean is, those studies don't have the power to distinguish between (regime -> sanctions -> deaths) vs (regime -> deaths + regime -> sanctions). I would definitely agree that sanctions cost lives (e.g. unavailability of specialist medicines) but I don't see a specific mechanism whereby they cause "millions" of deaths without a complete failure of local governance.