Senate Weighs Economic Sanctions Against Iran

By Learned Foote- Talk Radio News Service

The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs is weighing the possibility of levying economic sanctions against Iran. During a hearing on Capitol Hill Thursday, the committee discussed ways to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Nicholas Burns, a professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and former State Department official during the Bush administration, said that Iran’s hotly contested presidential election has compromised the power of its government, and that America “should seek to diminish its strength further.” He said that “Americans should seek to maintain our position as the dominant power in the Middle East, because our influence is positive in that region, and Iran’s is not.”

Burns said that President Obama has generally followed former President’s Bush “basic strategy” by trying to end the nuclear weapons project in Iran through negotiations before applying “draconian” economic sanctions. He said that he did not believe negotiations alone will successfully end Iran’s nuclear program, but said that financial, economic, and energy sanctions would be more effective.

Dr. Suzanne Maloney, a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institute, discussed the economic outlook in Iran. She said the country faces “serious economic problems: double-digit inflation, power shortages, a tumbling stock market, stubbornly high unemployment rates,...increasing dependence on volatile resource revenues, and perhaps most ominously for the Iranian leadership, a rising tide of popular indignation about economic frustrations.”

The panelists agreed that unilateral sanctions will not be effective unless other countries join in sanctions against Iran. “We alone in the United States don’t have the capacity to cripple the Iranian economy with our sanctions,” said Maloney. She argued that “multilateral steps represent the only real alternative to a negotiated solution.”

Testifying before the committee, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I- Conn.) praised an amendment added to the Defense Authorization bill, which passed last week. The amendment places a time limit on how long Iran would have to respond to U.S. requests for negotiation before sanctions would be imposed.

“This bill will basically say to companies worldwide who are selling gasoline to Iran, who are shipping it to Iran, or who are insuring or financing those shipments, you got a choice to make. You can continue what you are doing with Iran, or you can do business in the United States of America. You cannot do both,” said Sen. Lieberman. He said that the amendment would not force President Obama to act, but would grant him the authority of enacting economic sanctions.

Sen. Lieberman said that the amendment had bipartisan support. “No matter what may divide us on other issues, we are very united in our concern, our anger about the Iranian program of nuclear weapons development,” he said. “The greatest threat to peace is for Iran to get a nuclear weapons capability.”

Experts Warn Against Engaging Iran

Annie Berman -- Talk Radio News Service

A number of foreign policy experts warned the House Foreign Relations Committee Wednesday against engaging Iran.

“We should not be thinking or talking about engagement yet, just as we didn’t want to intervene with Iran’s internal affairs after the election by forcefully coming out in favor of the opposition,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an assoicate from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace . “I think by prematurely engaging before the dust has settled in Tehran we may implicitly endorse these election results, demoralize the opposition and unwittingly tip the balance in favor of the hard-liners,” Sadjadpour said during hearing on U.S. foreign policy options concerning Iranian nuclear development and societal tensions between the Iranian people and the military government regime.

Dr. Suzanne Maloney, Senior Fellow at The Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institute, said that the US needs to adjust it’s assumptions about Iran and “[The U.S.] approach to dealing with concerns about Iranian policies.” Maloney also warned that once the US is engaged with Iran, it must be aware that Iranian government

“The US has to deal to deal with an increasingly paranoid and dogmatic Iranian regime, one that is preoccupied with a low-level popular insurgency and a schism among it’s leadership,” Maloney warned.

Congressman Dan Burton (R-Ind.) advocated applying sanctions against the country.

“We are sitting here talking. They are developing a nuclear weapons program...for almost two decades. They haven’t made any allusions about stopping [that nuclear program]...We’re messing around by waiting and not imposing sanctions today. Every day that we wait we are risking a major conflict over there,” said Burton.

Burton also believes that putting pressure on Iran’s government, rather than on the Iranian people, is the best form of foreign policy for this particular issue.

Wednesday’s hearing was held six weeks after the Iranian election results which sparked massive protests in Tehran.