SPEAKING
FREELY US
meets resistance to Iranian
sanctions By Ardeshir Ommani
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
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If this article were
written to advise non-existing rational leaders of
the White House and the US Congress, my strong
recommendation to them, at risk of being called
naive, would be that they should immediately
announce that the US has no plan of going to war
against Iran and declare all sanctions are halted
and negotiations over Iran's nuclear program would
begin.
The reason for such advice is that
the present sanctions regime
and further aggravation
and possible war with Iran are utterly going
against US interests and credibility.
The
ongoing presidential and congressional campaign to
pressure the European Union, Turkey, Japan, China
and India to halt importing Iranian oil and
related financial transactions is facing
resistance by the importing companies and
countries.
For the United States to insist
and pressure the Iran-oil importing countries
would increasingly turn into a greater liability
for the US among what it frequently calls the
"international community".
Last week,
Timothy Geithner, US Treasury Secretary, began
visiting capitals around the world to deliver the
US's ultimatum to the governments of Spain and
Italy that unless they immediately put a halt to
Iranian oil imports, they would be risking US
trade and financial reprisals. Not uniformly, but
mostly, the countries have been rejecting the
implementation of an immediate halt.
According to Mure Dickies's article in the
January 13 issue of the Financial Times, "Turkey
has said it is not bound by new oil sanctions
against Iran." Taner Yildiz, Turkey's energy
minister, told reporters that his country did not
consider itself covered by the latest EU and US
sanctions. He continued that, "At the moment our
imports continue and as of today there is no
change in our road map."
Even Turkey, a
long-time member of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) military alliance, which not
too long ago was doing the US bidding in the
US-NATO destruction and "regime change" in Libya
and Washington's plot of de-stabilizing Syria is
not prepared in the case of Iran, a much larger
and stronger country, to toe the line which may
end up plunging this area into a regional war.
This may force Turkey into the firing line
between US-Israeli long- and medium-range missiles
and Iran's million-man para-military Basij,
regular army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards
Corps, joined by Hezbollah of Lebanon, the Shi'ite
Mahdi Army of Iraq and Hamas in Palestine, to say
nothing about the Kurds.
In his visit with
Chinese leaders, Geithner was even less
successful. In a news briefing with reporters, Cui
Tiankai, the vice foreign minister for US
relations, said that China supported global
non-proliferation efforts, but trade was separate
from the Iranian nuclear program.
"The
normal trade relations and energy cooperation
between China and Iran have nothing to do with the
nuclear issue. We should not mix issues of
different nature, and China's legitimate concerns
and demands should be respected."
The
minister at one point noted that some people had
tried to convince the international community that
any normal business dealing with Iran provided
financial support to that country and by extension
helped its nuclear program. In rejecting that
reasoning, he said, "This argument does not hold
water. According to this logic, if the Iranians
have enough money to feed their population, then
they have the ability to develop a nuclear
program. If this is the case, should we also deny
Iran the opportunity to feed its people?"
He added that Iran had the right to
develop peaceful nuclear power. "This issue cannot
be resolved by sanctions alone. It must
fundamentally be solved through negotiation."
As if rejection by Turkey and China was
not enough, the Treasury Secretary then tried
Japan, where the US, 67 years after World War II,
still keeps 50,000 American troops for which the
Japanese people are forced to provide bases,
financial and material support to their own
occupiers.
Geithner arrived in Tokyo on
Thursday, January 13 with a lobbying mission to
inform his Japanese counterpart that the US
Congress was planning to penalize financial
institutions that deal with Iran's central bank,
which clears oil payments. Japan imports 10% of
its crude oil consumption from Iran and is the
third-largest buyer of Iranian oil after China and
India.
A spokesperson of Japan's Trade
Ministry asserted that considering the large
volume of oil imported from Iran, Japan's ability
to manage a sharp reduction was highly limited
since urging companies to switch from Iranian
crude oil had no legal foundation. In other words,
the US Congress can pass legislations but must not
expect the people of Japan, at their own
liability, to carry them out.
For
Geithner, the situation in Italy and Spain was not
more hospitable. In an interview with Le Figaro,
Mario Monti, Italy's prime minister, emphasized
the significance of any reduction in the imports
of Iranian oil on the Italian economy, and pointed
out that 13% of Italy's total annual imports of
crude oil come from Iran, leaving it highly
vulnerable to any supply shock.
The prime
minister demanded that any oil deliveries from
Iran that were aimed at reimbursing billions of
euros of debt which Iran owes to Italy's national
oil company be excluded from the ban, otherwise
agreeing to by from the European Union instead.
According to Ikuko Kurahone and Dmitry
Zhdannikov of the International Business Times,
Italian, Spanish and Greek companies have
strangely extended most of their oil supply deals
with Iran for the current year, which means the
greater bulk of Iran's supply to the European
Union would reasonably be exempted from sanctions
for at least the entire 2012.
The
financial market sources revealed that Italy's
Saras (SRS.MI), ERG (ERG.MI) Iplom, Greece's
Hellenic (HEPr.AT) as well as Spain's Repsol
(REP.MC) had either extended or have not canceled
exiting contracts with Iran for 2012. Some stock
market traders told Reuters reporters that they
have kept their two-year deals with Iran. A trader
working with an Italian company stated: "At the
moment, it is business as usual."
Given
the fact that profit-making is the main reason and
motivation for exchange, it is not impossible to
avoid and by-pass the imperialist's road blocks.
Apparently, US congressmen and women and
top officials of the Barack Obama administration
who worked overtime on Section 1235 to slip the
punitive sanctions resolution into the National
Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), patting
themselves on the back that they would soon
tighten the noose around the neck of Iran and deny
Iran the revenue from its natural resources and
force them to either join the imperialist camp or
collapse, was more hallucination than a picture of
reality.
Their belief in idealism and its
embedded imperial arrogance prevents them from
rational and scientific thinking, ignoring that
their intended prey may be able to muster forces
well beyond the imaginations of the masters
sitting in Washington, Tel Aviv, Paris and London.
That real force is the strength and willingness of
the Iranian people to fight for their dignity and
national sovereignty, and they are not alone in
the world.
Ardeshir Ommani is a
writer on issues of war, peace, US foreign policy
and economic issues. He has two Masters Degrees in
the fields of Political Economy and Mathematics
Education.
Speaking Freely is an
Asia Times Online feature that allows guest
writers to have their say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing. Articles submitted for this section
allow our readers to express their opinions and do
not necessarily meet the same editorial standards
of Asia Times Online's regular contributors.
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