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‘Time running out over Iran’, Obama warned | Caledonian Mercury – World.

Obama: Waiting for UN move

Patience is running thin in the US Congress over President Barack Obama’s perceived dithering over Iran.

US military chiefs have told Congress that Iran could enrich enough weapons-grade uranium for a single bomb within a year, and overcome technical difficulties with the Shahab-3 missile, which has the range to hit Israel, within three to five years. “With sufficient foreign assistance, Iran could probably develop and test an intercontinental ballistic missile [ICBM] capable of reaching the United States by 2015,” a Pentagon document said.

On Sunday Iran’s Revolutionary Guards test-fired five missiles during the last stage of its “Great Prophet 5” manoeuevres in the Persian Gulf, a waterway crucial for global oil supplies.

Tehran denies it is trying to build a nuclear weapon, saying its programme is aimed solely at generating power. But its denial has failed to convince Mr Obama and even less the US Congress, which is pressing the president to block Iranian imports of petrol and other refined petroleum products. Though Iran is the world’s fifth largest crude oil exporter, due to a lack of refining capacity it has to import around 40 per cent of its petrol needs.

Mr Obama is hoping the UN Security Council will reach agreement on new sanctions early next month. These would target Iran’s access to banking, insurance and credit, but congressional leaders don’t believe they go far emough.

The Democratic Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, who has described Iran as “a festering sore in the world”, says time is running out to act, while Howard Berman, the top Democratic representative on the House foreign relations committee, says that while he supports Mr Obama’s efforts to engage Tehran, “all of his diplomatic overtures were rebuffed, and it should now be clear to the world that Tehran has no intention of changing its reckless course in the absence of strong and sustained pressure from the international community”.

The US move would have international repercussions, as any companies worldwide which supply petrol to Iran could be barred from doing business with America. There were signs that foreign companies were already responding to the US move: Christophe de Margerie, chief executive of Total, which delivers small amounts of fuel to Tehran, said his company would halt sales if the US legislation went through.

In a strongly worded editorial, the Christian Science Monitor last week warned against the petrol sanctions move because “the only way to really enforce such a crippling sanction against the Iranian economy would be through an American-led naval blockade which, by international law, is an act of war … History is instructive here: it was a US ban on the export of oil to Imperial Japan for its invasion of China that triggered the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbour. And a US naval blockade of Cuba in 1962 almost led to nuclear war with the Soviet Union.”

There are fears, too, that unless sanctions are seen to be working, Israel may strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities, as it did against
Iraq’s in 1981 and a suspected nuclear research centre in Syria in 2007.

The Obama administration has called for restraint from Israel, because any attack on Iran would escalate tensions and possibly plunge the Middle East into a new conflict. But though relations between the White House and Israel are at a low ebb over the expansion of Israeli settlements, support for Israel in Congress is as strong as ever. The US mid-term elections in November could be a factor in any Israel decision to attack Iran, and Israel’s Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu is not known for his patience.

With the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, suggesting in a leaked memo that the Obama administration has no clear strategy over Iran, some analysts are concerned that the president may be coerced into taking military action himself. “We do not know who leaked the Gates memo,” said an article in Politico.

“But the ‘senior officials’ who did so were clearly seeking to use their selective description to catalyze more robust planning for potential military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets – the very option that Gates has consistently opposed”.

The magazine added that Mr Obama might be encouraged to go down that route by a recent rise in public support for military action against Iran.

This entry was posted on April 26, 2010 at 8:47 PM and is filed under Iran / Israel War. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.