Iran divestment campaign in
trouble By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
His star may be fading in Israel, but
hawkish Likud leader and former prime minister
Benjamin Netanyahu says he is making steady
progress in his other campaign - for divestment in
Iran.
Since officially launching it in
Boston last January, Netanyahu and his right-wing
US supporters, such as Republican presidential
hopeful Mitt Romney, have managed to persuade a
number of state and local governments in the
United States to adopt the key
objective of his campaign,
that is, forcing US pension-fund companies to
divest from firms doing business with Iran.
According to a recent article on the
Jewish website Forward.com, Netanyahu's "freelance
diplomacy is carried out with the knowledge and
persuasion of [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert and the
Israeli foreign minister". However, there is
little evidence that the Israeli government is
doing much to apply the same pressure to Israel's
own companies involved with the hundreds of
international companies doing business with Iran.
Nor is there any sign that legislative
initiatives by the states of Ohio and California
have had any tangible results other than a mere
"symbolic" one. In Ohio's case, the state's school
pension fund is involved with some 44 companies
doing trade with Iran and, as yet, none has been
subjected to the theoretical pressure envisaged by
the Iran divestment campaign.
Of course,
it would be different if the federal government
put some teeth into this campaign, in light of
Senator Barack Obama's proposed Iran Sanction
Enabling Act, but that is unlikely to happen any
time soon, one reason being the resistance by
pension investors to their policing by Big
Brother, another the adverse potential
consequences such as loss of income and backlashes
from the "blacklisted" foreign companies.
The initial trial balloon is not likely to
continue either, irrespective of the recent news
that, following the city of Los Angeles, the
Iranian-American mayor of Beverly Hills,
California, has signed on to the Iran divestment
objective by pitching it at city hall. Yet the
fact is that opposition to it is growing. A recent
Los Angeles Times report on this subject quoted
the head of a school pension fund in California
objecting to it and stating that such drastic
measures are applied in extreme cases such as
genocide.
But, of course, that is
precisely what Netanyahu and company are
feverishly trying to sell in the US and elsewhere,
by claiming that the Iranian regime is "promoting
genocide". That is simply not the case, and anyone
mildly familiar with Iran's foreign policy would
know it is a wild claim based on a deliberate
caricature of Iran's intentions.
Meanwhile, European companies are allowed
by the European Union to sign agreements with Iran
in all sectors except nuclear power. As a result,
a growing number of European firms are involved in
the development of Iran's oil and gas. Case in
point: the Austrian energy group OMV recently
signed an US$18 billion gas deal, following the
footsteps of France's Total, which, in partnership
with Russia's Gazprom and Malaysia's Petronas,
signed a $2 billion deal to develop the giant
South Par field in 1997. Other examples are:
Norway's Norsk Hydro ASA, which signed a $107
million contract in 2006, Italy's Ansaldo Energia
SPA, Switzerland's EGL Inc, and a number of
Spanish and Polish companies.
Overall, the
Iranian Oil Ministry has been rather successful in
attracting foreign investment - some $36 billion
in the past couple of years alone - and this trend
will likely continue given the energy sector's
dire need for foreign investment and Iran's huge
potential, which is too enticing to ignore.
Even politically the Iran divestment plan
amounts to swimming against the current, seeking
to diminish or even extinguish the few remaining
threads of shared US-Iran economic interests, as
if isolating Iran is either feasible or practical
in today's globalized economy or that it will have
better luck stopping Iran's nuclear program
through isolation rather than proactive
engagement.
Unfortunately for Netanyahu
and allies such as Romney, the current visit to
Iran by International Atomic Energy Agency
officials appears to be making headway, promising
to yield results in terms of Iran's transparency
and compliance with the IAEA demands. This,
together with the absence of any "smoking gun"
confirming the "Iran is proliferating" alarms,
seriously undermines the Iran divestment campaign
of its main rationale. This comes precisely at a
time when another campaign is gaining ground in
the US and Europe: a formidable initiative in
academia to boycott academics from Israel in
response to that country's continued occupation
policy vis-a-vis the repressed Palestinians.
In the US, in particular, with various
church groups, such as the United Methodist
Church, putting their weight behind the Israel
divestment campaign, and former president Jimmy
Carter lambasting Israel's policy as "worse than
apartheid", the Netanyahu-led campaign actually
runs the risk of indirectly causing greater
interest in the academics' Israel boycott,
notwithstanding Netanyahu's own record of strongly
opposing Israel's withdrawal from Gaza.
Netanyahu's prescribed reoccupation of Gaza would,
of course, spell disaster not only for the
much-suffering Palestinians but also for Israel,
which has yet to formulate a coherent, long-term
policy on the question of the occupation.
There is, therefore, an indirect
connection between the Iran divestment and Israel
divestment campaigns; the former is headed by an
Israeli politician whose policies are decried by
the latter, and the more Netanyahu persists in his
campaign against Iran, the more people will be
convinced of the need to heed the discreet call by
the former US president to target Israel for
sanctions that were once applied against apartheid
South Africa.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi,
PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview
Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's
Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs,
Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa
Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear
potential latent", Harvard International Review,
and is author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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