"'Without immediate and serious action, the Islamic Republic of Iran will have a nuclear weapons capability in the near future,' Senator Kirk said."
This is the AIPAC-dominated US Senate at work. The Senate bill, which Mark Kirk is amending with even tougher language than the original, provides for draconian sanctions against the Central Bank of Iran with the intent of collapsing "the Iranian economy."
Kirk, who sold himself to Illinois voters as a "moderate" Republican, has transformed himself into a high profile neoconservative since he replaced Obama in the Senate.
He is playing on the same team with Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. officer, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Mark Dubowitz is the executive director and head of FDD's Iran Energy Project.
Gerecht and Dubowitz are the co-authors of a New York Times op-ed piece, Don't Give Up on Sanctions Against Iran, in which the authors mix greed with morality in a package designed to hurt the Iranian people while rewarding the Chinese economy.
"Effective energy sanctions don't have to raise oil prices; they can actually do the opposite. Washington just has to learn how to leverage greed.
"We should bar from operating in the United States any European and most Asian energy companies that deal in Iranian oil and work with the Iranian central bank, Revolutionary Guards or National Oil Company.
"At the same time, however, we should allow companies from countries that have little interest in Iran's nuclear program, or its pro-democracy Green Movement, and that are willing to risk their access to American markets -- mainly Chinese companies -- to continue buying Iranian crude in whatever quantity they desire.
"This would reduce the number of buyers of Iranian petroleum, without reducing the quantity of oil on the market. With fewer buyers to compete with, the Chinese companies would have significant negotiating leverage with which to extract discounts from Tehran. The government could lose out on tens of billions of dollars in oil revenue, loosening its hold on power.
"This approach may seem distasteful to some, because it does, in a sense, reward bad Chinese behavior. But the objective of sanctions is to cause real economic pain in Tehran, not to make Americans feel moral."
This plan, which advocates punishing the Iranian people, does so with about as much concrete evidence as the Bush-Cheney neoconservatives had to attack Iraq in 2003. Do we really want to travel down that highway again?
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) thinks we should. The FDD was born during the nation's war fever in the months following 9/11. FDD pushed strongly for war against Iraq. When President Obama was elected in 2008,
"FDD became a prominent opponent of the administration, pressuring for more aggressive action against Iran and criticizing efforts to negotiate with "enemy" states. FDD figures like Reuel Marc Gerecht and Michael Ledeen have been among the more vociferous hawks calling for U.S. military intervention in Iran and elsewhere, arguing that religious militants must be 'defeated.'
"In early December 2010, FDD hosted its annual forum on the theme of 'Countering the Iranian threat.' The conference's keynote speaker was then-newly elected Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL)."
Kirk and his neoconservative colleagues are joining a crusade to punish Iran's citizens. They are doing so with no more evidence against Iran's government than Bush and Cheney had against Iraq. And still they persist.
There is no way to read the Senate proposal and a companion House bill, other than to see them as emotion-driven actions, prompted by a neoconservative obsession with military force and a loyalty to the state of Israel.
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