Claudia Rosett exposes feeble US policy as Iran's democratic movement sinks, a year after a stolen election.
The fourth sanctions resolution to pass at the UN (last week) was (a) not unanimous & (b) omitted petroleum sanctions, the strongest possible weapon. At Commentary Blog, Jonathan Tobin adds detail of how weak the new sanctions are:
The sanctions make life a bit more difficult for 40 Iranians involved in the nuclear program, who had been mentioned in previous resolutions, by freezing their assets and banning their travel. Only one name was added to the list, Javad Rahiqi, the head of the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center. There is also language about requiring countries to inspect ships or planes headed to or from Iran if they suspect that banned cargo is aboard, but there is no authorization to board ships by force at sea. Iran is now also not allowed to invest in nuclear-enrichment plants, uranium mines, and related technology. The sale of heavy weapons to Iran is also now banned.
But as a result of many months of haggling with Russia and China, who gave only reluctant backing to these sanctions, Iran’s oil, financial, and insurance industries — which are all highly vulnerable to international pressure — were left untouched. As the New York Times noted today, the European Union — America’s supposed ally in the campaign to restrain Tehran’s nuclear plans — alone does more than $35 billion in business with Iran. The amount of trade between Iran and China — whose vote in favor of the mild measure just passed was bought by American concessions that watered down the same sanctions — exceeds that amount. China gets 11 percent of its oil from the Islamist regime. And as the Times reported in a feature last week, Iran’s ability to evade sanctions with shell companies and by having their ships registered under foreign flags has made a mockery of the world body’s previous attempts to sanction it.
Charles Krauthammer exposes Team Obama's fiction that Iran is diplomatically isolated:
From the beginning, the Obama strategy toward Iran and other rogue states had been to offer goodwill and concessions on the premise that this would lead to one of two outcomes: (a) the other side changes policy, or (b) if not, the world isolates the offending state and rallies around us -- now that we have demonstrated last-mile good intentions.
Hence, nearly a year and a half of peace overtures, negotiation, concessions, two New Year's messages to the Iranian people, a bit of groveling about U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup and a disgraceful silence when the regime's very stability was threatened by peaceful demonstrators.
Iran's response? Defiance, contempt and an acceleration of its nuclear program.
And the world's response? Did it rally behind us? The Russians and Chinese bargained furiously and successfully to hollow out the sanctions resolution. Turkey is openly choosing sides with the region's "strong horse" -- Iran and its clients (Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas) -- as it watches the United States flailingly try to placate Syria and appease Iran while it pressures Israel, neglects Lebanon and draws down its power in the region.
To say nothing of Brazil. Et tu, Lula?
This comes after 16 months of assiduously courting these powers with one conciliatory gesture after another: "resetting" relations with Russia, kowtowing to China, lavishing a two-day visit on Turkey highlighted by a speech to the Turkish parliament in Ankara, and elevating Brazil by supplanting the G-8 with the G-20. All this has been read as American weakness, evidence that Obama can be rolled.
the Times Online (UK) reports that Saudi Arabia has given Israel a green light to use a sliver of Saudi airspace for a military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities; the Saudis have worked out procedures with Israel in detail, with US acquiescence. Bill Kristol & Jamie Fly writes that it is time to consider the risks versus benefits of a military strike. But they omit (as nearly everyone does) the best argument for NOT delegating to Israel the task of taking military action: If Little Satan Israel strikes, Great Satan America will be blamed anyway. No one anywhere on the entire planet will believe that the US was not in some way involved. In such instance, if the US will be blamed anyway, the US should strike and do the more thorough job that is needed to delay Iran's quest for the longest possible time. Even better, the US should strike in conjunction with Israel, for maximum effective result.
Michael Ledeen, peerless Iran maven, sees the appeal of Iran's Khomeini revolution eroded by the regime's failure to break the opposition:
So is the new Iranian revolution fizzling? Has the regime taken firm control? The reality is that the regime's leaders are frightened, and everyone from the Ayatollah Khamenei down the dark labyrinths of this remarkably cheerless state knows that the only hope for the regime's survival is to intimidate the opposition.
Thus, the mass arrests of workers, intellectuals, filmmakers and any woman who shows a bit of hair under her veil. (Much of this brutality has been carried out by foreign forces, notably Hezbollah thugs brought in from Lebanon and Syria, adding to Iranians' rage.) Thus, the unprecedented ban on laughing or telling jokes recently promulgated at the Shiraz Medical School. Thus, the epidemic of executions, five and six a day of late. Many go unreported; the bodies simply disappear. The regime fears the dead almost as much as the living.
To say that the regime is unpopular is a gross understatement. A week ago Friday marked the anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the 1979 Islamic revolution that overthrew the shah and established the theocratic tyranny that's ruled the country ever since. Leaders called for a massive turnout to celebrate the Islamic Republic, and they bragged that millions of supporters would come to the Tehran cemetery where Khomeini's remains are interned. More than 50,000 buses were deployed for the effort, and supporters were offered free food and drink as well as free subway transportation to the shrine.
The event was a fiasco. There were more buses than demonstrators. And when Khomeini's grandson, Hassan, rose to ask why there was such a pitiful turnout in honor of his grandfather, he was shouted down by the thugs of the Basij, a paramilitary security force recently elevated to full standing in the Revolutionary Guard Corps, lest he publicly expose their failure to mobilize any meaningful support.
The failure to mobilize even 100,000 of the faithful was duly noted by the leaders of the opposition Green movement, who issued a challenge to the interior minister: Let's have two days of celebration of your so-called electoral victory. You get this Friday, a holiday, and we'll take Saturday, the beginning of the work week. Let's see what the turnouts tell us about the wishes of our people. The regime's response was automatic: Stay off the streets or we'll crush you.
Ledeen sees the regime becoming more vulnerable as discontent spreads. He ends his piece with a telling quote from, of all people, Martin Luther King, which nails the Obama administration for its contemptible failure to strongly, publicly back the Green Movement: "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends."
The Washington Post has come out urging Team Obama to vigorously back the Green Movement. It refers to Senator John McCain's recent Iran speech calling upon the administration to openly back the Green Movement:
For 16 months, the President’s outstretched hand to Iran’s rulers has been consistently and defiantly met with a clenched fist – a fist that is now more stained than ever with the blood of Iran’s sons and daughters. Yesterday, we finally shifted to sanctions. By itself, the latest Security Council resolution is inadequate. We now need Congress to finish the Iran sanctions bill, so we can pass it without delay. We need the Administration to impose new targeted sanctions against those Iranian officials, businesses, and banks that promote the regime’s most dangerous policies – and we need our partners in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East to do the same.
But what is the goal of all this? Is it to persuade Iran’s rulers to finally sit down and negotiate in good faith – to stop pursuing nuclear weapons, supporting terrorism, and abusing their own people? I truly hope this is possible, but that assumption seems totally at odds with the character of this Iranian regime.
For that reason, I would suggest a different goal: to mobilize our friends and allies in like-minded countries, both in the public sphere and the private sector, to challenge the legitimacy of this Iranian regime, and to support Iran’s people in changing the character of their government – peacefully, politically, on their own terms, and in their own ways. Of course, the United States should never provide its support where it is unrequested and unwanted. But when young Iranian demonstrators write their banners of protest in English – when they chant ‘Obama, Obama, are you with us, or are you with them?’ – that is a pretty good indication that we can do more, and should do more, to support their just cause.
We need to stand up for the Iranian people. We need to make their goals our goals, their interests our interests, their work our work. We need a grand national undertaking to broadcast information freely into Iran, and to help Iranians access the tools to evade their government’s censorship of the Internet. We need to let the political prisoners in Iran’s gruesome prisons know that they are not alone, that their names and their cases are known to us, and that we will hold their torturers and tormentors accountable for their crimes. We need to publicize the names of Iran’s human rights abusers, and we need to make them famous. Then we need to impose crippling sanctions on them for their human rights abuses – to go after their assets, their ability to travel, and their access to the international financial system, which is exactly the goal of legislation that I and others have proposed.
It is one thing for members of Congress to lead this effort; it would be quite another thing to get that leadership unequivocally from the President himself. The United States has never had a President whose personal story resonates as strongly overseas as President Obama’s does – whose ability to inspire, to move people, to mobilize them on behalf of democratic change is one of the greatest untapped sources of strength now available to Iran’s human rights activists. If the President were to unleash America’s full moral power to support the Iranian people – if he were to make their quest for democracy the civil rights struggle of our time – it could bolster their will to endure in their struggle, and the result could be historic.
Historic, that is, if only Team Obama were listening....
Bottom Line. Iran's nuclear clock keeps ticking, and the US is still behind the curve in dealing with it, sticking to tepid options that have zero chance of stopping the mullahs' march towards nuclear club membership.
Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, 9/11, National Security, Terrorism, Homeland Security, Nuclear Proliferation, Arms Control, WMD, Foreign Policy, UN, Conservative Politics
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