IDEALS

WASHINGTON, (Aug. 12, 2009) IPS/GIN – In the face of mounting
pressure from hawks in Washington and the continued threat of
military action from Israel, the Obama Administration has been
taking a harder line in its latest pronouncements about Iran.

Recent media reports have suggested that the administration is
leaning toward an end-of-September deadline for Tehran to respond
to U.S. diplomatic outreach concerning its nuclear programme, at
which point it will consider stepping up sanctions against the
Iranian energy sector.

This course would cut against the advice of a growing number of
Iran analysts, who have cautioned both that the Tehran regime is
in no position to negotiate at the moment and that sanctions are
likely only to solidify the power of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei
and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But the administration is facing a great deal of pressure to move
quickly to sanctions from congressional hawks – backed by hardline
organisations within the so-called “Israel lobby” – who have been
pushing for a tougher line against Tehran since well before the
Jun. 12 elections that triggered Iran’s current political crisis.

While it remains too early to tell whether the Obama administration
intends to follow through on threats of sanctions before the end
of the year, recent statements by administration officials have
sounded increasingly impatient with the rate of diplomatic
progress.

“We need to take stock in September,” Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton said Sunday in a television interview with CNN’s Fareed
Zakaria. “If there is a response, it needs to be on a fast track.
We’re not going to keep the window open forever.”

Clinton also stated that the U.S. is working with allies to prepare
“a very robust set of sanctions that we can get the international
community to sign off on” in case engagement does not bear fruit.

The administration has suggested that a Sept. 30 U.N. General
Assembly meeting will be the deadline for a diplomatic response
from Tehran.

This end-of-September deadline is itself a testament to the
political pressure the administration has come under from the
right.

When Obama took office in January, he was reluctant to set an
explicit timetable for engagement. During meetings with Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in May, Obama eventually
suggested that the administration would perform a “reassessment”
of progress at the end of the year.

The turmoil that followed Iran’s June elections has led some
analysts to propose a pause in the engagement schedule – since Iran
remains preoccupied with its internal crisis and its political
situation fluctuates on a daily basis.

Instead, the engagement timetable seems, if anything, to have been
expedited. While the administration has retained the end-of-year
timetable for tangible diplomatic progress, the end-of-September
deadline for a response is comparatively new.

Few expect Iran to be able to resolve its internal turmoil by Sept.
30, leaving open the question of how the U.S. intends to respond
if the deadline passes without a response.

Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council
(NIAC), is among those calling for a “tactical pause” in
engagement. Parsi cautioned Monday in the Huffington Post that,
“the biggest mistake the U.S. can commit is to begin setting
deadlines that no one – including the U.S. itself – believes can
be held up.”

Hawks in Congress, however, have other ideas. Congressional leaders
plan to push new anti-Iran sanctions legislation in September -
barring any major change in the diplomatic situation.

The most prominent piece of sanctions legislation is the Iran
Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA), which would impose
penalties on firms exporting refined petroleum products to Iran.
The IRPSA is co-sponsored by more than half the members of
Congress.

Hardline “Israel lobby” organisations such as the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents
of Major American Jewish Organisations are planning a major
September lobbying push in support of the legislation, the Forward
reported last week.

The Obama Administration has refrained from public comment on the
IRPSA and other pending congressional legislation.

But, last week, a flurry of media reports suggested that the
administration was giving increased consideration to new sanctions.

Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported Jul. 31 that U.S. National
Security Advisor James Jones had briefed Israeli officials on U.S.
plans for new sanctions. Similar reports in The New York Times and
The Guardian soon followed.

However, these reports relied primarily on anonymous Israeli and
European officials – leaving open the possibility that outside
actors were leaking information in order to try to box the
administration in to new sanctions.

In any case, all signs suggest that if the administration turns to
sanctions, it will aim for multilateral sanctions in conjunction
with allies rather than the unilateral sanctions being pushed by
Congress.

“The coverage of the Obama administration’s stance on sanctions
has been pretty disingenuous,” NIAC Acting Legislative Director
Patrick Disney told IPS. “I believe the administration has
communicated that if Iran does not accept by the end of September
the invitation to begin talks, then the U.S. will begin the process
for another round of multilateral sanctions.”

“[But] there is no evidence that the administration has
communicated anything remotely supportive of the [petroleum]
sanctions legislation to Congress,” Disney added.

Proponents of petroleum sanctions claim that they will weaken the
regime by exploiting its reliance on refined petroleum imports.
Despite its natural oil reserves, Iran lacks refining capacity and
must import between 25 and 40 percent of its refined petroleum.

Even some hawks concede, however, that unilateral sanctions
measures such as the IRPSA would be of limited utility in depriving
Iran of refined petroleum. Multilateral sanctions would be more
effective – however most analysts are sceptical that Russia and
China would sign on to such measures.

But, a growing number of commentators have suggested that even
effective petroleum sanctions would be self-defeating. They argue
that the brunt of these sanctions would be borne by innocent
Iranian civilians rather than the regime itself, and that they
would be likely to solidify the regime’s power by allowing it to
rally against a common enemy.

Sanctions opponents point to the example of Iraq, where strict
sanctions imposed from 1990 to 2003 were blamed for hundreds of
thousands of civilian deaths – without weakening the Saddam Hussein
regime’s hold on power.

“[T]here is absolutely not a shred of evidence that any major or
even minor opposition leader – from [presidential candidate] Mir
Hossein Moussavi to [presidential candidate] Mehdi Karrubi to
[former president] Mohammad Khatami, or any of their related
political organs or legitimate representatives – has ever uttered
a word that could possibly be interpreted as calling for or
endorsing any sort of economic sanction against Iran,” wrote
Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi on CNN.com.

“As in the Iraqi case, imposition of economic sanctions on Iran
will have catastrophic humanitarian consequences, while it will
even more enrich and empower such critical components of the
security and military apparatus as the Pasdaran and the Basij,”
Dabashi wrote.

On Tuesday, Nobel Prize-winning Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin
Ebadi warned against sanctions because of the harm they would do
to the Iranian people, Reuters reported.

Beyond the argument over sanctions looms the threat of Israeli
military force. Israel has repeatedly signalled that it would
consider a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities if
it is not satisfied with the progress of negotiations.

Some observers suggest that the Obama Administration’s increased
talk of multilateral sanctions is primarily intended to placate
Israel and its hawkish allies in the U.S., thereby giving the
administration some breathing room to work on a deal.

But these same hawks are determined to force the administration to
follow through on its talk of sanctions, and matters seem likely
to come to a head in the days leading up to the Sept. 30 deadline.