Iran Resolution Shelved in Rare Defeat for 'Israel Lobby'
By Jim Lobe
27/09/08 - -WASHINGTON, 26 Sep (IPS) - In a significant and
highly unusual defeat for the so-called 'Israel Lobby', the
Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives has
decided to shelve a long-pending, albeit non-binding, resolution
that called for President George W. Bush to launch what critics
called a blockade against Iran.
House Congressional Resolution (HR) 362, whose passage the
powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) had
made its top legislative priority this year, had been poised to
pass virtually by acclamation last summer.
But an unexpectedly strong lobbying effort by a number of
grassroots Iranian-American, Jewish-American, peace, and church
groups effectively derailed the initiative, although AIPAC and
its supporters said they would try to revive it next year or if
Congress returns to Washington for a 'lame-duck' session after
the November elections.
Congress, which may still adopt a package of new unilateral
economic sanctions against Iran -- some of which the
administration has already imposed -- over the weekend, is
expected to adjourn over the next several days.
''We'll resubmit it when Congress comes back, and we'll have
even more signatures,'' the resolution's main author, New York
Democrat Rep. Gary Ackerman, told the Washington Times, adding
that the resolution currently has 270 co-sponsors, or some
two-thirds of the House's entire membership.
Still, the decision by the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs
Committee, Rep. Howard Berman, to shelve HR 362 marked an
unusual defeat for AIPAC, according to its critics who charged
that the resolution was designed to lay the groundwork for the
Bush administration or any successor administration to take
military action against Iran.
'This was a joint effort by several groups to really put the
focus on the dangers presented by such a resolution over the
opposition of one of the most powerful lobbies in the country,'
said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American
Council (NIAC).
Among other provisions, the resolution declared that preventing
Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capacity was 'vital to the
national security interests of the United States' -- language
that is normally used to justify military action -- and 'demand(ed)
that the President initiate an international effort to
immediately and dramatically increase the economic, political
and diplomatic pressure on Iran to verifiably suspend its
nuclear enrichment activities...'
Among the means it called for were 'prohibiting the export to
Iran of all refined petroleum products; imposing stringent
inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes,
trains and cargo entering or departing Iran; and prohibiting the
international movement of all Iranian officials not involved in
negotiating the suspension of Iran's nuclear programme.'
Although the resolution's sponsors explicitly denied it --
indeed, one clause stated that 'nothing in this resolution shall
be construed as an authorisation of the use of force against
Iran' -- the resolution's critics charged that the latter
passage could be used to justify a blockade against Iran, an act
of war under international law.
'Ambiguity in the text of the resolution -- whether intended by
its drafters or not -- has led some to see it as a de-facto
approval for a land, air and sea blockade of Iran, any of which
could be considered an act of war,' according to Deborah DeLee,
president of Americans for Peace Now (APN), a Zionist group that
has long urged the administration to engage in direct talks with
Tehran and that lobbied against the resolution.
Two key Democratic congressmen, who had initially co-sponsored
the resolution, Reps. Robert Wexler and Barney Frank,
unexpectedly defected in July, insisting that its language be
changed to exclude any possibility that it could be used to
justify war against Iran and to include new provisions urging
Washington to directly engage Tehran.
The resolution was introduced last May, shortly after AIPAC's
annual meeting during which then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert reportedly told the House Democratic leadership,
including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Berman, and Ackerman that
economic sanctions against Iran had run their course and that
stronger action, including a possible naval quarantine, was
needed to increase pressure on Tehran to halt its nuclear
programme.
The meeting also followed talks between Olmert and Bush who,
despite an strongly hawkish speech before Israel's Knesset,
privately told his hosts that Washington would almost certainly
not attack on Iranian nuclear facilities nor give a green light
Israel to launch an attack of its own before he leaves office in
January 2009, according to a recent account by London's Guardian
newspaper. The administration itself never took a position on
the resolution.
At the time, the price of oil was skyrocketing, and the military
brass in the Pentagon, increasingly concerned about the
deteriorating situations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, was
expressing its opposition to military action against Iran in
unusually blunt terms.
Nonetheless, AIPAC pushed hard for adoption of the resolution,
even as it, like its Congressional sponsors, insisted that it
was not designed to justify military action.
Just last week, in a final push for the resolution's passage,
AIPAC drafted a letter that was circulated to House members who
had not yet co-sponsored the resolution. While it denounced as
'utter nonsense' suggestions that the resolution could be used
to justify military action, the text also stressed that Tehran's
'pursuit of nuclear weapons and regional hegemony' posed 'real
and growing' threats to 'the vital national security interests
of the United States'.
AIPAC's failure was particularly notable given the presence at
the U.N. General Assembly in New York this week of Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose repeated and predictably
provocative predictions about the demise of Israel and 'the
American empire' have been used routinely by AIPAC to rally
public and elite opinion against Tehran and underline the threat
it allegedly poses.
In announcing that the resolution has been shelved, Berman said
he shared critics' concerns about the resolution's working and
will not bring it before his committee until his concerns were
addressed. 'If Congress is to make a statement of policy, it
should encompass a strategy on how to gain consensus on
multilateral sanctions to change Iran's behaviour,'' his
spokesperson told the Times.
*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy, and particularly the
neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be
read at
http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
Click on
"comments" below to read or post comments
Comment
Guidelines
Be succinct, constructive and
relevant to the story.
We encourage engaging, diverse and meaningful commentary.
Do not include personal information such as names, addresses,
phone numbers and emails. Comments falling outside our
guidelines – those including personal attacks and profanity –
are not permitted.
See our complete
Comment
Policy and use this link
to notify us if you have concerns about a
comment. We’ll promptly
review and remove any inappropriate postings.
Send Page To a Friend
In
accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this
material is distributed without profit to those
who have expressed a prior interest in receiving
the included information for research and
educational purposes. Information Clearing House
has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator
of this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
|
