Page 2 of 2 SPEAKING
FREELY A steady squeeze on
Tehran By Amandeep Sandhu
cancellation of a planned
conference session on doing business in Iran. [11]
It is not coincidental that Dubai, the
Middle East's petrodollar repository and Iran's
access point to the global business world in the
face of US sanctions since 1979, was chosen by
Levey to warn companies about doing business with
Iran.
In his comments in Dubai, Levey
highlighted how banks such as
UBS,
HBSC, Standard Chartered, Commerzbank and many
others have limited their exposure to Iranian
business because these are "business decisions,
pure and simple". [12] But what he conveniently
forgot to mention was the $80 million in fines
that ABN AMRO had to pay for breaking the
sanctions last year.
Another way of
starving Iran of capital is by pressuring European
countries, which conduct more trade with Iran than
any other region, to cut off export credits and
guarantees. In 2005, Iran received $22.3 billion
worth of export credits and guarantees from member
states of the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development. [13] As a result of
US pressure, France, Germany and Japan have
sharply reduced export credits, and others have
committed to do the same in the near future.
Pushed by the Israel lobby, a divestment
movement to pressure businesses that invest in
Iran is gathering pace in the United States.
Drawing on the anti-apartheid divestment of the
1980s, the neo-conservative Gaffney-led Center for
Security Policy is leading a charge to punish
companies doing business with Iran by depriving
them of cash from some of the biggest
institutional investors, such as public pension
funds.
The groups aligned with the Israel
lobby have been pressuring pension funds since
2004; however, they only achieved a breakthrough
last year. Sarah Steelman, the treasurer of
Missouri, became the first state official to put
into practice "terror-free" investing, for which
she was invited to the 2007 Israel lobby annual
meeting as a keynote speaker.
Benjamin
Netanyahu, the former Israeli prime minister,
recently telephoned California Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger to press him to divest the state
public retirement fund from companies supposedly
investing in terror. [14] The divestment bill is
on its way to becoming law; other states such as
Florida, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Ohio are
working on similar bills.
Preparing for
regime change from below The campaign of
capital starvation is matched by a simultaneous
effort to strengthen domestic opposition forces in
Iran. Since last year, a newly created office of
Iranian affairs led by Elizabeth Cheney is
financing a large number of civil-society groups
under the Iran Democracy Project that "must
outline activities linked to reform and
demonstrate how the proposed approach would
achieve sustainable impact in Iran". [15]
In a repeat of the pattern of the "color"
revolutions of the recent past, the United States
is funding a number of civil-society groups via
the National Endowment of Democracy (NED). The US
Congress is increasing funding for the Iran
Democracy Project: $66.1 million in 2006; $85
million for 2007; and $100 million for 2008. [16]
During 2008, 75% of the fund will be designated
for the support of civil-society and human-rights
projects in Iran.
Last year, $20 million
of allocated funds went to civil-society and
human-rights programs, while the majority - $36.1
million - went to improve Persian-language media
programing into Iran via the Voice of America's
Farsi service and Radio Farda, the radio channel
founded in 2002 aimed at the youth of Iran.
Recently, Radio Farda's website began a section
devoted to "four non-violent revolutions". [17]
The NED-affiliated International
Republican Institute has been providing training
to groups and individuals from Iran outside the
country on what could be called non-violent civil
disobedience, but is in fact a preparation for
regime change from inside.
Waiting for
regime disorientation US economic and
information pressure is mounting against Iran.
While efforts to stop oil companies investing in
Iran have produced mixed results, the increased
pressure is making companies hedge their bets.
Pressure via the financial sector has been more
effective, since most banks have fallen into line
and increasingly the Iranian government faces
trouble financing its energy projects.
The
real role of capital starvation - either via
pressure on oil companies or via financial means -
is to disorient the regime in Tehran. A military
attack looks unlikely at this point, though it
cannot be discounted.
External military
pressure - the encirclement of Iran from
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, the Gulf states and
the naval armada in the Persian Gulf - adds to the
potential of regime disorientation in Tehran. If
this leads to infighting and turmoil, into the gap
might step the Iranian opposition under training
somewhere in the region.
Amandeep Sandhu writes on South
Asian and Middle Eastern affairs and is a
chancellor fellow at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. He can be reached at
sandhu@umail.ucsb.edu.
(Copyright 2007
Amandeep Sandhu.)
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