UN
Agrees To New Iran Sanctions
By Chris Marsden
27 March, 2007
World
Socialist Web
The
unanimous March 24 vote by the United Nations Security Council to impose
stricter sanctions on Iran is the latest step in the Bush administration’s
campaign to isolate the regime in Tehran and prepare the conditions
for a possible military attack. The resolution came one day after Iranian
Revolutionary Guard naval forces seized 15 British Navy personnel in
the Persian Gulf, setting off a diplomatic confrontation between Iran
and the UK.
The resolution, the second
to impose sanctions in the past three months, imposes new financial
penalties as punishment for Iran’s refusal to suspend its uranium-enrichment
programme. It targets 15 individuals and 13 organisations, including
Iran’s central bank. For the first time, it imposes sanctions
on the elite Revolutionary Guard Corps and a subordinate military unit,
the Quds Force, which have no relationship to the country’s nuclear
programmes.
The targeting of the Revolutionary
Guard, whom the US and Britain accuse of arming Hezbollah in Lebanon,
Hamas in the Palestinian Authority and anti-occupation Shia militia
in Iraq, combined with a ban on Iranian weapons exports, gives the United
States a new legal pretext for subversion and military action against
Iran.
In recent months, the Bush
administration has charged Iran with arming anti-US militia, and implied
that the American military has a right to attack Iran in order to defend
US troops in Iraq. Washington will undoubtedly now claim that Iran is
continuing to arm Iraqi militia and cite the new resolution to give
it the cover of UN authority for intensified military preparations against
Tehran.
“Is this aimed at preventing
Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons,” asked Jean du Preez, director
of the international organisations and non-proliferation programme at
the Monterey Institute of International Studies, “or is this regime
change in another form?”
Once again, Russia, China
and the other members of the Security Council lined up behind Washington.
China and Russia were opposed to tougher travel restrictions on Iranian
officials and an embargo on the sale of conventional arms to Iran, but
refused to challenge the essential thrust of US efforts. Russia has
applied its own pressure on Iran by holding back fuel for Iran’s
nearly completed nuclear power reactor at Bushehr.
Discussions on a series of
amendments proposed by three of the Security Council’s non-permanent
members, South Africa, Indonesia and Qatar, saw the US and Britain face
down all significant changes, including South Africa’s proposal
for a 90-day moratorium on all sanctions to allow for negotiations.
Having expressed their concerns over the final language of the resolution,
the three countries dutifully voted for it.
The New York Times quoted
R. Nicholas Burns, under secretary of state for political affairs, stating,
“We are trying to force a change in the actions and behaviour
of the Iranian government. And so the sanctions are immediately focused
on the nuclear weapons research programme, but we also are trying to
limit the ability of Iran to be a disruptive and violent factor in Middle
East politics.”
The pressure can be stepped
up further in 60 days’ time, when the International Atomic Energy
Agency is due to report back on whether Iran has suspended its uranium-enrichment
programme.
There is, however, one element
of the resolution’s provisions that does not go as far as the
US would wish. The resolution invokes Chapter 7, Article 41 of the United
Nations charter. Whereas this renders the resolution’s provisions
mandatory, it does not sanction military action.
This makes all the more significant
the events leading up to the confrontation between the Royal Navy and
Iran in the Gulf. Though it appears that Britain is presently approaching
the issue with a degree of caution, and the matter was not raised directly
at the Security Council meeting, the detention of 15 Royal Navy personnel
could still be used as a pretext for future military action.
The exact circumstances leading
up to the incident are hotly contested. Britain, backed by the US and
the European Union, claims that the eight sailors and seven Royal Marines
attached to the frigate HMS Cornwall were seized in Iraqi waters by
Iranian forces while aboard a dhow searching for contraband and weapons.
London asserts that Iranian boats drew alongside and took the British
personnel at gunpoint into Iranian waters at 10:30 a.m. local time.
But Iran insists that the
confrontation was in Iranian waters and that there have been repeated
incursions by British vessels into its territory. The Fars news agency
said the British personnel had been taken to Tehran for questioning
for “failing to respect international frontiers and for illegally
entering Iranian territorial waters.”
The Iranian military has
since claimed that its interrogators obtained confessions from the 14
men and 1 woman that they had strayed illegally into Iranian territorial
waters.
The Iraqi military commander
in charge of territorial waters issued a statement that tends to confirm
the Iranian case. Brigadier-General Hakim Jassim in Basra said, “We
were informed by Iraqi fishermen...that there were British gunboats
in an area that is out of Iraqi control. We don’t know why they
were there.”
The sailors were seized in
the narrow Shatt al-Arab waterway, the confluence of the Tigris and
Euphrates Rivers that forms the southern border between Iraq and Iran.
The precise boundary in the waterway between the two countries has long
been a matter of dispute.
In 2004, eight British military
personnel were captured by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps in the Shatt al-Arab. Tehran insisted at that time that the three
boats intercepted were in Iranian waters, and Britain’s denials
were half-hearted, containing descriptions of “appalling weather”
and a “confused situation.”
Fundamentally, the incident
cannot be understood outside of the escalation of political hostilities
and military threats by Washington and London against Tehran. There
is some speculation that the Iranians may have seized the British in
retaliation for the detention by US troops in Iraq of five Iranians
alleged to be Revolutionary Guards.
Relations between Iran, the
US and Britain are so tense that even a relatively small dispute could
spark a wider confrontation. Washington and London have been building
up their naval presence in the Gulf for months, claiming that this is
necessary to prevent Iranian efforts to arm the insurgency in Iraq.
The US presently has two
aircraft carrier battle groups stationed in the Gulf, and Britain has
committed major military resources to the US-led effort. On February
26, Britain’s senior naval officer in the Persian Gulf and deputy
commander of coalition maritime operations for US Central Command, Commodore
Keith Winstanley, reported that Royal Navy deployments in the region
have doubled since October. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph,
he made clear that this was intended at the very least as a threat to
Iran. “Most of these ships are here on training missions,”
he said, “but there is no doubt that we could use the war-fighting
capabilities they possess.”
The British vessels sent
to the Gulf include HMS Cornwall, two minesweepers, HMS Ramsey and HMS
Blythe, and a vessel from the Royal Fleet Auxiliary. Winstanley referred
to the area of operations as a “battle space.”
The incident in the Gulf
coincided with fresh accusations by Lt. Col. Maciejewski, the commanding
officer at the UK base at Basra Palace, that insurgents in southern
Iraq are being funded and armed by Iran. In an interview with BBC Radio
4’s Today programme, he said he had no “smoking gun”
to back up his claims, but then claimed that “all the circumstantial
evidence points to Iranian involvement in the bombings here in Basra.”
Assertions that Iran is on
the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons capability may have so far played
the central role in the efforts of the Bush administration to justify
a possible military strike on Tehran. But with permanent Security Council
members Russia, China and France opposed to such a move, together with
its non-permanent members, a military incident that could be portrayed
as proof of Iranian hostilities against coalition forces would provide
a convenient excuse for war.
This possibility was publicly
raised last month by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser
in the Carter administration. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, he set out what he described as a “plausible scenario
for a military collision with Iran” that could be used by the
Bush administration.
This might involve, he suggested,
“some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed
on Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action
against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening
quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan”
(emphasis added).
Publicly, Prime Minister
Tony Blair has declared that there are no US plans for military action
against Iran, but he has also refused repeatedly to rule out the possible
use of force. As long ago as April 2006, the Telegraph reported secret
talks between the Blair government and defence chiefs over the “consequences
of an attack on Iran.”
The newspaper continued,
“It is believed that an American-led attack, designed to destroy
Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear bomb, is ‘inevitable’
if Teheran’s leaders fail to comply with United Nations demands
to freeze their uranium enrichment programme.”
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