WASHINGTON - In the latest ratcheting up
of pressure on Iran, the administration of US
President Barack Obama imposed new financial
sanctions against Iranian and other companies
whose operations allegedly support the country's
nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. The
Treasury Department said on Thursday it was
blacklisting 11 companies and several individuals
associated with Iran's defense ministry, the
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as well
as Iran's national shipping line.
It also
blacklisted several companies in Hong Kong,
Switzerland and Malaysia, as well as the National
Iranian Tanker Company (NITC), which the Treasury
alleged have been used by the national oil company
to evade existing sanctions against Iranian oil
experts.
"Iran today is under intense,
multilateral sanctions pressure, and
we will continue to
ratchet up the pressure so long as Iran refuses to
address the international community's well-founded
questions about its nuclear program," said
Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and
financial intelligence David Cohen.
"Today's actions are the next step on that
path, taking direct aim at disrupting Iran's
nuclear and ballistic missile programs, as well as
its deceptive efforts to use front companies to
sell and move its oil," he added.
While
the new sanctions were described by the State
Department as part of the administration's
"dual-track approach" to both increase pressure on
Tehran and engage it diplomatically, a number of
observers said the latest escalation carried
risks.
"The question is how much
escalation can be tolerated before the whole
diplomatic process falls apart, and, if it falls
apart, what comes next," noted Trita Parsi, the
president of the National Iranian American Council
(NIAC) and the author of two highly-regarded books
on US-Iranian diplomacy.
The latest
sanctions follow the application late last month
of other US sanctions approved by congress last
December punishing foreign financial institutions
that do business with Iran's central bank. On July
1, a European Union (EU) ban on all oil imports
from Iran to its member states also took effect.
The sanctions come amidst a
much-ballyhooed US military build-up in and around
the Gulf.
Ten days ago, the New York Times
ran a front-page feature article embroidered by
tough talk by unnamed "senior" Pentagon officials
detailing the deployment to bases of friendly
countries of dozens of attack aircraft, including
F-22 "stealth" warplanes, to bolster the fleet of
combat jets aboard carrier strike groups already
stationed in the region.
On Thursday, the
Times reported the arrival late last week in the
Gulf of a converted amphibious transport ship
designed to serve as a floating forward staging
base for helicopters, Special Operations Forces,
and other assets in the event hostilities break
out.
Also Thursday, the Los Angeles Times
reported that the Navy is "rushing tiny underwater
drones to the Persian Gulf" that, once deployed,
would be used to find and destroy sea mines in the
event that war breaks out and Iran follows through
on its threats to close the Strait of Hormuz.
For its part, Iran last week carried out
three days of military exercises designed to show
that its missiles were capable of striking US
bases in the region, as well as targets in Israel
whose government has recently revived speculation
that it may carry out attacks against Iran's
nuclear facilities before the US elections in
November.
The increase in tensions and
bellicose talk comes in the wake of three
high-level rounds of negotiations between Iran and
the so-called P5+1 (the five permanent members of
the UN Security Council plus Germany) since March,
as well as a low-level technical meeting in
Istanbul that concluded last week with agreement
to meet at a sub-ministerial level again in
Istanbul on July 24 to test whether existing gaps
can be narrowed.
When the talks began in
March, many observers believed that an interim
confidence-building accord could be reached fairly
quickly. Its basic elements would include
Tehran's agreement to freeze all of its uranium
enrichment above five percent and to ship out in
stages its existing stockpile of 20%-enriched
uranium in exchange for formal recognition of its
right to enrich uranium under the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a delay or
easing of some of the sanctions, particularly by
the EU.
But the Obama administration,
which had previously hinted that such an agreement
was possible, appeared to harden its position over
the following three months, apparently under
pressure from Israel and its powerful backers in
both major US parties.
Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long insisted that
Tehran should not be permitted to enrich uranium
on its own soil under any circumstances a position
that most Iran experts consider a non-starter.
While Obama has not gone that far, he
appears to have adopted at least for now a
position similar to that of his predecessor,
George W Bush: that Iran should be required to
suspend all enrichment, at least until questions
raised by the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) about possible military dimensions of
Iran's nuclear program dating back a decade or
more are fully resolved.
Washington also
appears to have endorsed Israel's demand that
Iran's underground Fordo enrichment facility be
permanently dismantled before any serious
sanctions relief can be considered.
"The
Obama administration would welcome negotiating
success but evidently has calculated, perhaps
mistakenly, that it would be too politically
damaging domestically to bring to the negotiating
table what would be necessary to achieve success,"
noted Paul Pillar, a former top CIA Middle East
analyst who teaches at Georgetown University.
As a result, the negotiations seem to have
reached an impasse even though none of the parties
is prepared to call it that for fear that doing so
would likely lead to a war none of them wants.
Pro-Israel hawks, on the other hand, have
pronounced the talks dead and are calling for
ever-tougher measures both on the economic front
and in making the threat of war more credible.
Thus, Mark Dubowitz, executive director of
the Likudist Foundation for the Defense of
Democracies who has also helped draft much of the
sanctions legislation in congress, called on the
administration last week to "step up its economic
warfare" against Iran by blacklisting all foreign
companies that deal with Iran's energy sector, its
central bank, its automotive industry, and
IRGC-controlled construction and
telecommunications companies.
"If that's
insufficient to get (Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali)
Khamenei to strike a deal the president needs to
unite the country in moving beyond sanctions and
preparing for US military strikes against Iran's
nuclear weapons program," he wrote in
foreignpolicy.com.
Similarly, Michael
Singh, a former Bush official now with the
pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East
Policy, called in a Washington Post op-ed this
week for more pressure on every front. While
hailing Obama's military build-up in the Gulf, he
stressed the administration "should make more
serious statements about USwillingness to employ
force and [make] an end to statements exaggerating
the downsides of military action."
While
Obama has not yet taken Singh's last
recommendation to heart, the latest sanctions, not
to mention the military build-up, move Washington
yet another step in the direction recommended by
Dubowitz and other hawks in what one astute
commentator, Robert Wright of the Atlantic
magazine, described as "Obama's drift toward war
with Iran."
"Their objective," according
to Pillar in reference to the hawks, "evidently is
not success at the negotiating table but instead
the indefinite perpetuation of the Iranian nuclear
issue for other reasons or the checking off of a
box on a pre-war checklist."
Jim
Lobe's blog on US foreign policy can be read
at http://www.lobelog.com.
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