Western sanctions on Iran are as comprehensive and punishing as they have ever been. And yet they haven’t worked and probably never will.

The sanctions are intended to block oil sales and banking transactions. But they are providing far less than a hermetic seal. In fact, new leaks are springing almost every day. And, as the United Nations pointed out a few days ago, Iran is galloping forward with its atomic-weapons program, while denying that it’s underway.

Late last week, leaders of 120 nations met in Tehran for the nonaligned nations’ conference. They actually voted to endorse Iran’s nuclear program. Many of these states are also ignoring U.N. sanctions and helping Iran.

Tanzania is reflagging Iranian oil tankers. Iraqi banks are laundering cash from Tehran. China is routing Iranian money through its banks ― while also buying about half of Iran’s oil exports. Iranian merchants are trading truckloads of devalued rial for dollars at raucous, unregulated bazaars over the border in Afghanistan.

Even with all of that and more, life for the majority of Iranians right now is bleak. Most food now costs at least twice what it used to. Unemployment is rising; 30 percent of Iranians under 25 can’t find a job. Inflation is clawing toward 25 percent. The ranks of the really poor are rising.

But in truth, none of that has anything whatsoever to do with the government’s decisions on its nuclear program. While the price of cooking oil is rising above what some people can pay, wealthy Iranians are buying record numbers of high-end luxury cars ― BMWs, Mercedes, Maseratis, Porsches ― even though with taxes and sanctions they can cost up to $360,000.

“Buyers are paying upfront for these cars,” one car salesman told an AFP reporter.

You see, with all the attention on Iran’s nuclear program, most people have forgotten that Iran is one of the planet’s most corrupt states. Even with all the sanctions, “there’s been a boom in wealth among anyone who has a government contract or a government business,” Hooman Majd, an Iranian-American journalist, told me.

The people in government, and those who work for them, are doing quite well, thank you.

In fact, Majd added, “this isn’t so bad for the regime. It gives them a chance to crack down” and blame all of it on the Americans. Most Iranians aren’t really able to react because “they are preoccupied with food prices and inflation.”

If Iran’s leaders aren’t suffering ― far from it ― what incentive do they have to make concessions to the West? Few if any. After all, in Iranian culture, saving face is perhaps the most important political imperative.

So, sanctions can work only under one circumstance ― if the Iranian people stand up and protest their plight, just as they did after that fraudulent election in 2009. Even then it would have to be a mass uprising powerful enough to throw the government out ― or force it to change.

Well, here we are after more than a decade of sanctions, two months after another fraudulent election, and there’s no evidence at all that Iranians are planning to stand up. In fact, in Majd’s view, while ordinary Iranians are struggling, “it’s more about discomfort than absolute hunger” ― not bad enough “to cause them to riot.”

He and other Iranians say they believe moderate discomfort, the struggle to buy enough food, is so preoccupying that it’s making an uprising even less likely.

What alternatives does that leave the West? Military action, of course, is the most oft-discussed option ― particularly in Israel. Majd, however, believes the West needs to offer “a realistic deal that allows the Iranians to save face. Maybe allowing them to go down from 3,000 centrifuges to 1,500.”

That could work, in theory. But I can’t see the United States or other Western countries making a face-saving deal. Showing “weakness” toward Iran would be politically suicidal for any Western politician who advocated it.

This feels like a stalemate with no palatable non-miliary alternative. Meantime, last week the United Nations reported that, since May, Iran has doubled the number of centrifuges in its Fordow nuclear complex, buried deep inside a mountain, and has produced 417 pounds of uranium enriched to 20 percent, just shy of bomb grade.

The debate now is between those who believe Iran is working to build a bomb ― and others who think the regime is trying to acquire the materials that would allow it to put one together on relatively short notice.

Both options are unacceptably scary.

By Joel Brinkley

Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for the New York Times. ― Ed.

(Tribune Media Services)