But it would be disastrous to impose new sanctions on Iran now and senators know that," said Joe Cirincione, the head of the Ploughshares Fund, a non-proliferation advocacy group.
Disastrous civil wars, onerous sanctions and corrupt misrule turned Yugoslavia from the most open and developed nation in the old Communist orbit into the sick man of Central Europe, with a collapsed economy, plummeting living standards and a wretched inventory of bombed bridges, severed electrical lines and outdated factories.
After the collapse of the USSR, North Korea lost its communist financers and that, combined with tough sanctions and disastrous policy decisions, resulted in the famine of the 1990s where an estimated one million people died.
On Tuesday, the North's official Korean Central News Agency urged Japan to think twice about the "disastrous consequences" that would follow sanctions.
Shamara and his brother, Ali, are scions of a mercantile family that produced textiles in the 1960s and '70s and later, as the regime withered under international sanctions following the disastrous invasion of Kuwait in 1990, supplied Hussein's ministries with chemicals, pesticides, medical equipment and harvesters.
Many Iraqis welcomed or tolerated the US-led invasion because it ended sanctions and Saddam Hussein's disastrous rule.
He rails against America's trade deficit with China, against Isis terrorists who "chop off people's heads", against a "disastrous" deal with Iran to end sanctions in exchange for limits on its nuclear programme.
Critics pointed out that Saddam Hussein's regime survived for years under sanctions and only a disastrous war and occupation deposed him.
As tension on the Korean peninsula mounted, US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, led calls for a further round of sanctions and warned North Korea of a "disastrous course" if it attempted future nuclear arms tests.
The "removal of sanctions under the deal has already produced disastrous results," he said.
