October 27, 2007	Saturday	Shawwal 14, 1428

The US administration may understand that its sanctions announced on Thursday will have limited effect, and is in fact laying the ground for military action over Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program, experts said.

“I’m sceptical about if it (sanctions) will have any impact on all, primarily because the US unilaterally has very limited leverage over the Iranian state, economy and armed forces,” said Alex Vatanka at Jane’s Information Group.

“You only have to look at past behaviour from the Russians, the Chinese and to some extent the Europeans to feel sceptical about how much other countries around the world will rally to the US on this,” he said.

Professor Paul Pillar, an Iran expert at Georgetown University, said sanctions are only effective if the targeted country has the prospect of better relations in return for better behaviour.

For the oil-rich Islamic republic, given recent bellicose statements from Washington, “it is pretty hard to find much hope of what would be a better relationship” with the United States, Pillar said.

President George W. Bush suggested last week a nuclear-armed Iran could trigger ‘World War III’, and Vice-President Dick Cheney spoke on Sunday of ‘serious consequences’ unless the Islamic republic comes to heel.

Pillar said the Bush administration appears to be trying to close down its successor’s options in engaging with Iran, as sanctions are much harder to lift than they are to impose.

The White House now has ‘a posture of confrontation’ with Iran, and hardliners in both Washington and Tehran are ‘bringing out the worst in each other’, he said.

The US sanctions target the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which was accused of spreading weapons of mass destruction, and the IRGC’s elite Quds Force, which was designated as a supporter of terrorism.

Three Iranian state-owned banks were also blacklisted, along with IRGC-controlled companies and the logistics arm of Iran’s defence ministry, as the United States stepped up a drive to squeeze Iran out of global banking.

Lee Wolosky, a former National Security Council aide under both Bush and president Bill Clinton, recalled the global blacklisting of a Macau bank linked to North Korea after it was sanctioned by the US Treasury.

“When the US government declares a financial institution radioactive, you see a tremendous ripple effect throughout the international financial community,” he said.

“It’s not unlikely that you’re going to see a similar effect (with Iran) ... even if European allies have not signed up today to these steps.” The United States already has a unilateral trade embargo in place against Tehran, and has pressured European banks to sever their ties with Iran.

European giants HSBC, Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse have pulled out of Iran while BNP Paribas, Commerzbank and Dresdner Bank have severely curtailed their business with the Islamic republic.

But the United States has been frustrated by Russian and Chinese reluctance to impose a third round of UN sanctions over Iran’s nuclear programme, and US officials said that Chinese trading links with Iran were in fact on the rise.

Meanwhile, in targeting the IRGC and Quds Force, the United States has for the first time directly sanctioned another country’s military – a step that Vatanka warned could put the country ‘on the slippery slope’ to war with Iran.

For Manochehr Dorraj, professor of international relations at Texas Christian University, there may be a hidden agenda to the new sanctions.

Their effectiveness hinges ‘in large measure’ on the cooperation of European allies such as France and Germany, and Russia and China, “which have even closer political and financial ties with Tehran”, he said.

But Dorraj said that if Iran continues to enrich uranium, then the Bush administration can argue that sanctions have failed “and that the military option is the only viable alternative”.

—AFP