WASHINGTON - In a significant and highly unusual defeat for the so-called
"Israel lobby", the Democratic leadership of the US House of Representatives
has shelved a resolution which called for President George W Bush to launch a
naval "blockade" against Iran.
The resolution (HJ Res 362), was the top legislative priority for the powerful
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and despite critics claiming
it was tantamount to a declaration of war, it looked poised to pass virtually
by acclamation last summer.
But an unexpectedly strong lobbying effort by a number of grassroots
Iranian-American, Jewish-American, peace and church groups derailed the
initiative, though AIPAC and its supporters said they will try to revive it
next year or if Congress returns to
Washington for a "lame-duck" session after the November elections.
"We'll resubmit it [HJ Res 362] when Congress comes back, and we'll have even
more signatures,'' its main author, New York Democrat Gary Ackerman, told the
Washington Times, adding that the resolution currently has 270 co-sponsors, or
some two-thirds of the House's entire membership.
However, the House of Representatives did approve a bill that will authorize US
state and local governments to divest the assets of their pension funds and
investments in companies that have invested more than US$20 million in Iran's
oil industry. The bill still has to go before the Senate.
The decision by the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Howard
Berman, to shelve HJ 362 marked an unusual defeat for AIPAC.
"This was a joint effort by several groups to really put the focus on the
dangers presented by such a resolution over the opposition of one of the most
powerful lobbies in the country," said Trita Parsi, president of the National
Iranian American Council.
Among other provisions, the resolution declared that preventing Iran from
acquiring a nuclear weapons capacity was "vital to the national security
interests of the United States" - the type of language normally used to justify
military action. It also demanded, "that the President initiate an
international effort to immediately and dramatically increase the economic,
political and diplomatic pressure on Iran to verifiably suspend its nuclear
enrichment activities ... ".
Among the means it called for were "prohibiting the export to Iran of all
refined petroleum products; imposing stringent inspection requirements on all
persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains and cargo entering or departing Iran;
and prohibiting the international movement of all Iranian officials not
involved in negotiating the suspension of Iran's nuclear program".
Although the resolution's sponsors explicitly denied it - indeed, one clause
said, "nothing in this resolution shall be construed as an authorization of the
use of force against Iran", the resolution's critics said the latter passage
could be used to justify a blockade against Iran, an act of war under
international law.
"Ambiguity in the text of the resolution - whether intended by its drafters or
not - has led some to see it as a de-facto approval for a land, air and sea
blockade of Iran, any of which could be considered an act of war," according to
Deborah DeLee, president of Americans for Peace Now , a Zionist group that has
long urged the administration to engage in direct talks with Tehran and which
lobbied against the resolution.
Two key Democratic congressmen who initially co-sponsored the resolution,
Representatives Robert Wexler and Barney Frank, unexpectedly defected in July,
insisting its language be changed to exclude any possibility that it could be
used to justify war against Iran and to include new provisions urging
Washington to directly engage Tehran.
The resolution was introduced in May, shortly after AIPAC's annual meeting
during which then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert reportedly told the
House's Democratic leadership, including speaker Nancy Pelosi, Berman and
Ackerman, that economic sanctions against Iran had run their course and that
stronger action, including a possible naval quarantine, was needed to increase
pressure on Tehran to halt its nuclear program.
The meeting also followed talks between Olmert and Bush, who despite an
strongly hawkish speech before Israel's Knesset (parliament), privately told
his hosts that Washington would almost certainly not attack Iranian nuclear
facilities or give Israel a green light to launch an attack of its own before
he leaves office in January 2009, according to a recent account by London's
Guardian newspaper. The Bush administration itself never took a position on the
resolution.
At the time, the price of oil was skyrocketing, and the military brass in the
Pentagon, increasingly concerned about the deteriorating situations in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, was expressing its opposition to military action
against Iran in unusually blunt terms.
Nonetheless, AIPAC pushed hard for adoption of the resolution, even as it, like
its congressional sponsors, insisted that it was not designed to justify
military action.
Just last week, in a final push, AIPAC drafted a letter that was circulated to
House members who had not yet co-sponsored the resolution which while
denouncing as "utter nonsense" suggestions that the resolution could be used to
justify military action, did stress that Tehran's "pursuit of nuclear weapons
and regional hegemony" posed "real and growing" threats to "the vital national
security interests of the United States".
AIPAC's failure is particularly notable, given the presence at the UN General
Assembly in New York this week of Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, whose
repeated and predictably provocative predictions about the demise of Israel and
"the American empire" have been used routinely by AIPAC to rally public and
elite opinion against Tehran and underline the threat it allegedly poses.
In announcing that the resolution had been shelved, Berman said he shared
critics' concerns about the resolution's workings and that he would not bring
it before his committee until these were addressed. "If Congress is to make a
statement of policy, it should encompass a strategy on how to gain consensus on
multilateral sanctions to change Iran's behavior,'' his spokesperson told the
Times.
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy, and particularly the
neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
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