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White House: No Harsh Sanctions on Iran
In a rare display of nonpartisanship, the House Foreign Affairs Committee has passed by a 37 to 1 margin a bill increasing pressure on Iran over its nuclear program – but the Bush administration opposes the legislation. The Iran Counter Proliferation Act, approved on Tuesday, would impose sanctions on countries that invest in Iran, particularly in Iran’s energy sector. Specifically, it would repeal the administration’s authority to waive penalties under the Iran Sanctions Act. It would also block the import of all Iranian products, and brand the Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps – which helped pull off the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996 – as a terrorist organization, Brian Faughnan notes in an article for The Weekly Standard. The Bush administration opposes the bill in the belief it would undercut the sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council and other multilateral efforts to convince Iran to cease what is viewed as efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.
Story Continues Below Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos, D-Calif., said that back in 1998, when Iran sanctions legislation was first passed, "many European leaders were still holding out hope that Iran’s nuclear efforts were strictly geared toward peaceful energy use. By now every single European leader fully understands, and acknowledges, that Iran is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons. "So it is time for Europeans’ actions to catch up with their perceptions. It is time to cease investing in Iran’s energy industry, and our legislation will facilitate that result.”
Jim Phillips, Research Fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Heritage Foundation, notes that the committee’s strong backing of the bill indicates widespread support in the House, and the administration may be forced to compromise or see a veto overridden. Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton, is sharply critical of the administration’s handling of Iran, saying it may already be too late for any sanctions to be effective.
"The current approach of the Europeans and the Americans is not just doomed to failure, but dangerous,” he said in an interview with the Jerusalem Post. "Dealing with [the Iranians] just gives them what they want, which is more time.” He continued: "We have fiddled away four years, in which Europe tried to persuade Iran to give up voluntarily. Iran in those four years mastered uranium conversion from solid to gas and now enrichment to weapons grade . . . We lost four years to feckless European diplomacy and our options are very limited.” Those options, he said, are to seek the overthrow of the Iranian regime and its replacement with a new regime that won’t pursue nuclear weapons, or the last-resort use of force.
© NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved.
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