New Iran sanctions as war chorus rises
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Amid new calls for Washington to attack Iran's nuclear facilities
if its diplomatic efforts at curbing Tehran's uranium-enrichment program fail,
the United States on Wednesday imposed unilateral sanctions against eight
senior Iranian officials whom it accused of committing "sustained and severe
violations of human rights".
Announced at a joint press appearance by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the sanctions include a ban on travel to
the US and a freeze on any US-based assets owned by the officials, mainly top
officers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
"On these officials' watch or under their command, Iranian citizens
have been arbitrarily beaten, tortured, raped, blackmailed and killed,"
declared Clinton.
"Yet the Iranian government has ignored repeated calls from the international
community to end these abuses, to hold to account those responsible, and
respect the rights and fundamental freedoms of its citizens," she added.
Those sanctioned include Mohammed Ali Jafari, the commander of the IRGC; Sadeq
Mahsouli, minister of welfare and social security; Qolam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei,
former minister of intelligence and current prosecutor general; Saeed
Mortazavi, former prosecutor general; Heydar Moslehi, the current minister of
intelligence; Mostafa Mohammad Najjar, deputy commander of the armed forces;
Ahmad-Reza Radan, deputy chief of Iran's National Police, and Hosseijn Taeb,
deputy commander of the IRGC for intelligence.
The sanctions are the first imposed by Washington against Iranian officials for
rights-related reasons. They come amid growing speculation over the resumption
of negotiations between the US, as well as other major powers, and Tehran over
the latter's nuclear program, and amid increasing calls by Israel-centered
neo-conservatives, among others, for the Obama administration to take military
action if such negotiations do not soon bear fruit.
In a speech before the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) on
Wednesday, independent Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman praised the new
sanctions, as well as the administration's success in getting its European and
Asian allies to impose tough economic sanctions of their own.
But he also called for the administration to "take steps that make clear that
if diplomatic and economic strategies continue to fail to change Iran's nuclear
policies, a military strike is not just a remote possibility in the abstract,
but a real and credible alternative policy that we and our allies are ready to
exercise".
"Nothing is more corrosive to the prospect of resolving this confrontation
peacefully than the suspicion - among friends and enemies alike in the Middle
East - that in the end, we will acquiesce to Iran's acquisition of a nuclear
weapons capability," the former Democratic vice presidential candidate
declared. "If a nuclear Iran is as unacceptable as we all say it is, we must be
prepared to do whatever is necessary to prevent the unacceptable."
Lieberman's speech, in which he also described "stopping Iran from acquiring
nuclear weapons capability" as "the single-most important test of American
power in the Middle East today", was the latest in a series by key figures
arguing in favor of military action if sanctions and diplomatic efforts failed
to curb Iran's nuclear program.
Last week, for example, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, with whom Lieberman
has frequently aligned himself, also said Washington must prepare itself to use
military force to prevent Iran from actually obtaining a weapon.
"If you use military force against Iran, you've opened up Pandora's box,"
Graham told a hawkish audience at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a
neo-conservative think-tank that played a key role in the run-up to the 2003
invasion of Iraq. "If you allow Iran to get nuclear weapons, you've emptied
Pandora's box."
"I'd rather open Pandora's box than empty it," said Graham, who also predicted
that "a military strike by air and sea" could result in the overthrow of the
Iranian regime without the need for US ground troops.
Shortly after Graham's comments, Israel's US-born ambassador, Michael Oren,
strongly suggested in a Yom Kippur sermon to three influential Washington
synagogues that Israel would attack Iran on its own if Obama did not do so - a
message that was immediately and explicitly endorsed by the editor of the
Weekly Standard and a major Iraq War hawk, William Kristol, who also previewed
Lieberman's speech on the Standard's website on Tuesday night, noting
approvingly that it "should cause quite a stir".
The new sanctions, which are far more narrowly targeted than sweeping economic
sanctions against foreign companies doing business with Iran enacted by the US
Congress in June, were authorized by an amendment submitted by Lieberman and
Republican Senator John McCain to the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions,
Accountability and Divestment Act of 2010.
Obama had been heavily criticized by Republicans and many human-rights
activists after the contested June 2009 presidential election for not speaking
out more forcefully against what many in Washington believe was a fraudulent
result and for the subsequent efforts to suppress the opposition "Green"
movement and its supporters.
The administration's reluctance to do so was explained in part by the priority
Obama placed on engaging Iran diplomatically - along with the other four
permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany, or the "Iran Six" -
in hopes of reaching an agreement that would persuade Tehran to abandon or
drastically curb its nuclear program.
The administration feared that adopting the "Green" movement's charges of
fraud, or criticizing the human-rights record of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad
too harshly would make it harder for his government to engage or, worse,
trigger a nationalist backlash that would strengthen hardline elements within
the regime.
"We were very mindful of the messages we were getting from Iranians both inside
Iran and outside Iran that we had to be careful that this indigenous opposition
was not somehow seen as a US enterprise," Clinton said on Wednesday.
But as repression against the "Green" movement intensified and after Tehran
equivocated over a confidence-building proposal put forward by the Iran Six
last autumn that would have sent half of Iran's growing stockpile of
low-enriched uranium go out of the country in exchange for more highly enriched
fuel for a nuclear plant that produces medical isotopes, the administration
became less restrained in its criticism.
In one statement that drew widespread notice and approval among hawks and some
human-rights activists last February, Clinton accused the regime of "moving
toward a military dictatorship".
That assessment coincided with the administration's decision to lobby other key
countries, notably Russia and China, to impose a fourth round of UN Security
Council sanctions against Iran - a watered-down version of which it succeeded
in getting last June; support the US Congress' enactment of sweeping unilateral
economic sanctions against third-country companies doing business with Iran in
key sectors; and to lobby its allies to adopt similar measures.
The impact of those sanctions - and whether they will succeed in persuading
Iran to accept curbs on its nuclear program - is a matter of fierce debate.
While Ahmadinejad has denounced them, as he did at the UN last week, as
"meaningless", other officials, notably former president Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani, have urged the government to take them seriously.
Administration officials have suggested that Ahmadinejad's prediction last week
that negotiations between Iran and the Iran Six will likely resume next month
indicates that the sanctions are having the desired effect.
The impact, if any, of the sanctions announced on Wednesday on prospects for
those negotiations is unclear, but Clinton extolled them as a "new tool that
allows us to designate individual Iranians, officials complicit in serious
human-rights violations, and do so in a way that does not in any way impact on
the well-being of the Iranian people themselves."
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.
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