Iraq/Iran: Here come the sanctions
Posted: Thursday, October 25, 2007 9:27 AM by Domenico Montanaro
Filed Under:
Security
The Washington Post broke the news. “The Bush administration plans to roll out an unprecedented package of unilateral sanctions against Iran today, including the long-awaited designations of its Revolutionary Guard Corps as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction and of the elite Quds Force as a supporter of terrorism, according to senior administration officials… The new sanctions will empower the United States to financially isolate a large part of Iran's military and anyone inside or outside Iran who does business with it, U.S. officials said. The measures could affect hundreds of foreign companies by squeezing them to drop Iranian business or risk U.S. sanctions.”
The
New York Times adds that this “is the first time that the United States has taken such steps against the armed forces of any sovereign government.” Per NBC’s Libby Leist, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson will appear jointly today at 9:00 am ET to announce the sanctions.
The New York Times also front-pages Giuliani’s foreign policy advisers, who include a Who’s Who of prominent neoconservatives. “Mr. Giuliani’s team includes Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative who advocates bombing Iran ‘as soon as it is logistically possible’; Daniel Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps; and Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written in favor of revoking the United States’ ban on assassination.”
More: “Based on his public statements, Mr. Giuliani does not share all of their views and parts company with traditional neoconservative thinking in some respects. But their presence has reassured some conservatives who have expressed doubts about Mr. Giuliani’s positions on issues like abortion and gun control, and underscored his efforts to cast himself as a tough-minded potential commander in chief.”
As we've been saying for weeks now, Iran is the new Iraq in the Democratic primary. The Washington Post's Balz goes through the disputes between Clinton and the rest of her opponents and notes the struggles that Obama, in particular, is having in getting traction on this issue -- since he both supported a similar resolution earlier this year and then didn't vote on Lieberman-Kyl.
