Who will be most crippled by the new Iran sanctions?
April 29th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
On Wednesday The Nation’s Robert Dreyfuss provided an interesting summary of a recent conference committee meeting where members of the house and senate gathered to “outbid” each other on just how “crippling” their proposed sanctions for “Iran” could get.
Dreyfuss describes the speakers as “rabid, right-wing Republicans or militantly pro-AIPAC Democrats” and argues that recently proposed “draconian” bills that will impose sanctions on anyone that sells gasoline or petroleum products to Iran will not only be bad for business, they are also highly unlikely (as Juan Cole and others have argued) to weaken the Iranian government into submission in the first place.
Significantly, Dreyfuss notes the Obama Administration has so far resisted the house and senate bills in question, but key US congress members (pressured by Israel lobbyists devoted to blocking the prospect of diplomatic relations between the US and Iran) are determined to “force” the Obama administration into complying after they present a finalized Iran sanctions bill to the White House.
Most of the conferees lambasted the White House – and previous administrations, too – for refusing to implement Iran-bashing legislation that they’d helpfully enacted in the past. That’s because diplomats and others with cooler heads, including key players in the administration of George W. Bush, too, realize that sanctioning allies and imposing harsh penalties on European, Russian, Chinese, and Indian companies doesn’t win friends and influence people. (The Clinton administration realized the same thing, and President Clinton refused to impose draconian measures in the 1990s that Congress wanted.) But in 2010, Congress is so mad at Iran, and so unhappy with resistance from the White House and the State Department, that this time they’re going to write a bill that forces President Obama’s hand.
Read Dreyfuss’s entire post here.
