[NYTr] Beeman: Sanctions Against Iran Will Cure Nothing

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Providence Journal - Nov 16, 2007
http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_beeman15_11-15-07_AL7KE0C_v10.2ae2e1e.html

Sanctions Against Iran Will Cure Nothing

by William O. Beeman
Minneapolis

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION declared new economic sanctions against Iran on
Oct. 25. These new sanctions, announced by Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, like those already in place, will accomplish nothing
except to increase international tensions.

The new sanctions are an extension of a longstanding failed policy
first begun under the Reagan administration, and extended under the
Clinton administration. The United States is acting utterly alone; it
is not supported by any other nation.

American dealings with Iran have failed in large part because the
United States has never articulated any goals in its dealings with Iran
that make any sense either to Iranians or to Americans. They mostly
consist of calls for Iran to cease actions that Iran asserts are not
being carried out in the first place. The principal accusations against
Iran include: developing nuclear weaponry, supporting terrorist groups
and providing arms to Iraqi insurgents. The United States then tries to
prove that Iran is indeed carrying out the things it is accused of.

The Iranians counter with further proof that the accusations are
baseless, and so it goes, ad infinitum. There has never been any proof
that Iran’s domestic nuclear-energy program is directed at developing
nuclear weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), charged
with inspecting nuclear facilities under the Nuclear Non-proliferation
Treaty, to which Iran is a signatory, has repeatedly asserted that no
evidence of Iranian nuclear-weapons development exists. Iran’s leaders
also maintain that they are not developing nuclear weapons; Iran’s
spiritual leader, Ali Khamenei, has declared that nuclear-weapons
development is illegal in the Islamic Republic.

The Bush administration obscures these inconvenient facts with
statements like those made recently by President Bush, who said on Oct
17, “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III . . . you ought to
be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary
to make a nuclear weapon,” implying that the weapons are actually under
development.

Iran’s support for terrorist groups is also far less than it seems.
Iran provided humanitarian support for the Hamas-led government of the
Palestinian Authority after Israel and the United States established an
international embargo of funds for that government. Although Iran was
instrumental in the founding of Lebanese Hezbollah, Tehran no longer
has any effective influence or control of this group, which has evolved
into an active political party with a large number of parliamentary
representatives and government officials in Lebanon today.

Neo-conservative Michael Ledeen, of the American Enterprise Institute,
in a new book maintains that Iran supports al-Qaida, and that Iran was
instrumental in the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the United States, but
this assertion and similar claims that Iran supports the Taliban make
no logical sense. Both conservative Sunni al-Qaida and the Taliban
reject Shiism, the state religion of Iran, as a heresy, and sanction
the killing of Shiites.

Finally, there is no proof that Iran is supporting attacks against
Americans in Iraq. As analysts Seymour Hersh, Gareth Porter and others
have pointed out, the Bush administration, having failed to establish
that Iran is actually developing nuclear weapons, turned in desperation
to the claim that Iran is supplying explosive devices to militias in
Iraq through the offices of the Revolutionary Guard and its specialized
Quds force. Gen. David Petraeus, who directs American military forces
in Iraq, himself has admitted that no Iranian Quds force member has
ever been captured in Iraq, and evidence of Iranian-supplied weapons in
Iraq is nebulous.

The U.S. sanctions will also fail because Iran still has many friends.
Europeans still have extensive trade with Iran. Russian President
Vladimir Putin recently warned the United States not to think of
attacking Iran. On Oct. 16 the nations bordering the Caspian Sea,
including Iran, issued a declaration, in which the countries agreed
that none would let their territories be used as a base for military
strikes against any of the others. India has renewed talks with Iran to
establish a pipeline between the two nations. Iran has a positive
balance of trade with China (as well as India). China’s leadership has
repeatedly declared that Iran’s nuclear energy program is not an
international threat. Japan continues to be an important Iranian trade
and diplomatic partner.

Thus the new sanctions are being greeted with skepticism by the
international community of nations. They are so insubstantial that it
seems they are actually designed to fail. Increasingly, it seems that
the United States itself does not believe in them, but has only imposed
the sanctions as a prelude to military action. As in the build-up to
the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the world awaits the announcement from the
White House that, “having tried everything,” nothing was left except to
bomb Iran.

[William O. Beeman, an occasional contributor, is an anthropology
professor and chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the
University of Minnesota. He was a professor of anthropology and the
director of Middle East Studies at Brown University.]