Free Iran: So long as this regime has access to Iran’s oil income, all other sanctions, although may be necessary, are band-aid solutions at best – if not just feel good measures.  America needs to focus on the source of the regime’s strength, its oil income, and not waste so much time and effort on cutting of each individual tentacle.

President Obama’s quiet nomination of S. Leslie Ireland, a top former CIA, Defense Department and DNI specialist on Iran, to be the Treasury Department’s top intelligence official seems to signal that he’s putting the final pieces in place for tougher sanctions on the Tehran regime.

Ireland has been serving Obama recently as an intelligence briefer. But prior to that, she spent 25 years in intelligence, much of it concentrating on Iran. Go to Washington Post.

The Obama administration and Congress are gearing up for a battle over sanctions against Iran, with Capitol Hill resisting White House pressure over measures the administration says could antagonise allies and complicate its foreign policy. Go to Financial Times.

There is no reason why the White House and the State Department can’t speak up for broad principles, such as democracy, justice, free speech, and free association. Go to AEI.

PARIS — The United States’ notions of U.N. sanctions on Iran have devolved over the past months from crippling ones to ones that bite to the currently described smart ones, which although packaged with the words tough and strong might not be hard-nosed enough to give the mullahs a half-hour’s lost sleep.

Is this a descending spiral of resolve fated to result in sanctions that pinch, nip or tweak? Go to NY Times.

…The Bush and Obama policies toward Iran, at least since 2005, have been remarkably consistent — and largely an extension of the Clinton policy of carrot and stick. Play ball with us and the international community, successive secretaries of state have told the Iranians, and don’t build any nukes, and we’ll extend the carrots of diplomatic recognition and expanded trade. Don’t play ball, and expect the stick of sanctions — or even possibly military action. Go to National.

A large majority of Iranian lawmakers, angered over the Obama administration’s new nuclear weapons policy that conspicuously makes Iran and North Korea possible targets, urged their government on Sunday to formally complain to the United Nations in a petition that called the United States a warmonger and threat to world peace. Go to NY Times.

In the midst of the recent U.S.-Israeli tumult, a curious conventional wisdom is starting to evolve. A Washington that cajoles Israel on its settlements and resumes the peace process in earnest may finally garner Arab support for dealing with Iran’s nuclear menace. Although pressuring Israel to restrain its settlements may be a sensible means of gaining constructive Arab participation in the peace talks, it is unlikely to affect the region’s passive approach to Iran. Indeed, should Tehran perceive fissures and divisions in U.S.-Israeli alliance, it is likely to further harden its nuclear stance. Go to Washington Post.

Free Iran:  Preventing the regime from selling Iran’s oil should be America’s #1 priority.  So long as the regime has access to Iran’s oil income, it can repress the Iranian people, pursue its nuclear ambition and interfere in Iraq & Afghanistan.  The Obama administration needs to focus on the source of the regime’s strength , Iran’s oil income, and not so much on the regime’s tentacles.

Iran’s state shipping company has changed the names and ownership of most of its vessels to evade U.S. sanctions, but the Treasury Department has yet to update the blacklist that U.S. companies use to verify they are in compliance, according to a new report.

As a result, some firms are at risk of doing business with the company, Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, despite a ban that has been in place since 2008, says the report by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a Washington-based nonprofit watchdog.

The findings raise questions about the effectiveness of some of Washington’s sanctions, which are aimed at pressuring the regime in Tehran not to build nuclear weapons—something Iran denies it is doing.  “Iran has made more of an effort to circumvent the sanctions imposed on IRISL than the United States has made to enforce them,” the report states. “This pattern must change if sanctions are to be effective.” Go to WSJ.

Free Iran: An article for those who favor realpolitik and claim that promoting human rights is a luxury America cannot afford – like those who advocate engaging the regime in Tehran.  Realpolitik has its own set of unintended consequences.

Ignoring human rights in favor of stability is backfiring not just in Kyrgyzstan, but all over Central Asia — big time.

Go to Foreign Policy.

Associated Press

As U.S. President Barack Obama intensifies his efforts to garner international support for fresh U.N. sanctions against Iran, Tehran is quietly putting its own measures in place for renewed confrontation with the West. Watching how a conventionally armed Iran manages to destabilize the entire region only serves to underline how dangerous a nuclear-armed Iran would be.

For all of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s public bluster, the Iranian regime likely feels threatened by the prospect of further sanctions—so much so that it has now embarked on a well-organized and coordinated effort to attack or undermine Western interests throughout the region. The most sinister trend is the revival of Iran’s international terrorist infrastructure, which is evident in neighboring Afghanistan where NATO intelligence officers have reported a marked increase in cooperation between Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Taliban insurgents.

…With so much Iranian activity taking place throughout the region, the message is clear: Any attempt by the West to increase the pressure on Iran over its nuclear program will result in an explosion of violence throughout the Middle East and beyond. The problem is that doing nothing about Tehran’s nuclear ambitions would be even more dangerous.

Mr. Coughlin is executive foreign editor of London’s Daily Telegraph. The updated edition of his book “Khomeini’s Ghost” has just been published by Ecco.

Go to WSJ.

Free Iran:  The old saying: “Give an inch and they’ll take a mile” applies to this regime.  Given the response below, why negotiate with them?  Why Compromise?  Oil income is the Achilles’ heel of this regime.  Without its petrodollars, the regime would be hard pressed to pursue its nuclear development, interfere in Iraq and Afghanistan, finance radical organizations, project its influence throughout the Middle East, buyoff supporters-for-rent, and hire goons to repress the Iranian people.    Without its oil income, the regime may even collapse and the Iranian people may – at last – achieve their freedom.  That’s why the US needs to begin unilaterally sanctioning any insurance and shipping company that assists the regime to sell Iran’s oil.  It’s the oil income, stupid. The Obama administration needs to focus more on the source of this regime’s strength, its oil income, and not so much on the regime’s tentacles.

AP:  Iran ridicules Obama’s nuclear strategy

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran’s hard-line president on Wednesday ridiculed President Barack Obama’s new nuclear strategy, which turns the U.S. focus away from the Cold War threats and instead aims to stop the spread of atomic weapons to rogue states or terrorists.

Obama on Tuesday announced the new strategy, including a vow not to use nuclear weapons against countries that do not have them. Iran, however, was a notable exception to that pledge, along with North Korea, because Washington accuses them of not cooperating with the international community on nonproliferation standards.

Concerns over Iran’s nuclear program figure prominently in the new U.S. strategy. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the focus would now be on terror groups such as al-Qaida as well as North Korea’s nuclear buildup and Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad derided Obama over the plan in a speech Wednesday to a crowd of thousands in the country’s northwest.

“American materialist politicians, whenever they are beaten by logic, immediately put their finger on the trigger like cowboys,” he said.

“Mr. Obama, you are a newcomer (to politics). Wait until your sweat dries and get some experience. Be careful not to read just any paper put in front of you or repeat any statement recommended,” Ahmadinejad said in the speech, aired live on state TV. “(American officials) bigger than you, more bullying than you, couldn’t do a damn thing, let alone you.”

By DAVID E. SANGER and PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — President Obama said Monday that he was revamping American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons.

But the president said in an interview that he was carving out an exception for “outliers like Iran and North Korea” that have violated or renounced the main treaty to halt nuclear proliferation.

Discussing his approach to nuclear security the day before formally releasing his new strategy, Mr. Obama described his policy as part of a broader effort to edge the world toward making nuclear weapons obsolete, and to create incentives for countries to give up any nuclear ambitions. To set an example, the new strategy renounces the development of any new nuclear weapons, overruling the initial position of his own defense secretary.

Mr. Obama’s strategy is a sharp shift from those of his predecessors and seeks to revamp the nation’s nuclear posture for a new age in which rogue states and terrorist organizations are greater threats than traditional powers like Russia and China.

It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the cold war. For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack.

Those threats, Mr. Obama argued, could be deterred with “a series of graded options,” a combination of old and new conventional weapons. “I’m going to preserve all the tools that are necessary in order to make sure that the American people are safe and secure,” he said in the interview in the Oval Office.

White House officials said the new strategy would include the option of reconsidering the use of nuclear retaliation against a biological attack, if the development of such weapons reached a level that made the United States vulnerable to a devastating strike.

Mr. Obama’s new strategy is bound to be controversial, both among conservatives who have warned against diluting the United States’ most potent deterrent and among liberals who were hoping for a blanket statement that the country would never be the first to use nuclear weapons.

Mr. Obama argued for a slower course, saying, “We are going to want to make sure that we can continue to move towards less emphasis on nuclear weapons,” and, he added, to “make sure that our conventional weapons capability is an effective deterrent in all but the most extreme circumstances.”

The release of the new strategy, known as the Nuclear Posture Review, opens an intensive nine days of nuclear diplomacy geared toward reducing weapons. Mr. Obama plans to fly to Prague to sign a new arms-control agreement with Russia on Thursday and then next week will host 47 world leaders in Washington for a summit meeting on nuclear security.

The most immediate test of the new strategy is likely to be in dealing with Iran, which has defied the international community by developing a nuclear program that it insists is peaceful but that the United States and its allies say is a precursor to weapons. Asked about the escalating confrontation with Iran, Mr. Obama said he was now convinced that “the current course they’re on would provide them with nuclear weapons capabilities,” though he gave no timeline.

He dodged when asked whether he shared Israel’s view that a “nuclear capable” Iran was as dangerous as one that actually possessed weapons.

“I’m not going to parse that right now,” he said, sitting in his office as children played on the South Lawn of the White House at a daylong Easter egg roll. But he cited the example of North Korea, whose nuclear capabilities were unclear until it conducted a test in 2006, which it followed with a second shortly after Mr. Obama took office.

“I think it’s safe to say that there was a time when North Korea was said to be simply a nuclear-capable state until it kicked out the I.A.E.A. and become a self-professed nuclear state,” he said, referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency. “And so rather than splitting hairs on this, I think that the international community has a strong sense of what it means to pursue civilian nuclear energy for peaceful purposes versus a weaponizing capability.”

Mr. Obama said he wanted a new United Nations sanctions resolution against Iran “that has bite,” but he would not embrace the phrase “crippling sanctions” once used by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. And he acknowledged the limitations of United Nations action. “We’re not naïve that any single set of sanctions automatically is going to change Iranian behavior,” he said, adding “there’s no light switch in this process.”…

Go to NY Times.

The United Nations Security Council on Monday failed to include Iran’s nuclear programme on its agenda for April, underlining the likely slow road to sanctions that Barack Obama, US president, had hoped to have in place “within weeks”.

Japan’s Yukio Takasu, this month’s president of the 15-member council, said no meeting had been scheduled because it was not yet clear “when this might be taken up. It may not be taken up”.

Mr Obama, buoyed by what Washington officials perceived as a shift in China’s attitude towards imposing fresh sanctions on Iran, said a week ago that he wanted to see a fourth round of UN measures in place within weeks.

China had insisted further time should be given for a diplomatic solution to the nuclear stand-off. But western diplomats said Beijing was now ready to engage on the sanctions issue by attending talks in New York among ambassadors of the so-called P5 plus one – the five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany.

Chinese officials have been circumspect and the talks, which could be a prelude to Beijing accepting increased pressure on Iran, have yet to be scheduled.

Mr Takasu said on Monday that, even if the P5 plus one eventually agreed a package of proposed sanctions, it would be “highly desirable” for the 10 non-permanent members of the council, including Japan, to also be consulted. “It’s the intention of the concerned countries to have a resolution in the Security Council,” said Mr Takasu, whose country has supported previous sanctions measures. “How soon and how we will be consulted, we will have to wait and see.”

Diplomats conceded that, assuming China agreed in principle to sanctions, it could take weeks to negotiate the text of a resolution that it, Russia and several non-permanent members of the council might find acceptable.

Go to Financial Times.

In its latest proposed set of tougher United Nations sanctions on Iran, the U.S. is again relying on asset freezes as one tool to pressure the country not to build nuclear weapons.

But a close look at how much Iranian money has been frozen to date in the U.S. under existing sanctions shows that the total amount is surprisingly small, less than $43 million, or roughly a quarter of what Iran earns in oil revenue in a single day.

Other countries also haven’t frozen very much, despite freezes implemented by the European Union and the U.N., interviews show. Switzerland, for example, has frozen only about $1.4 million in Iranian assets—a tiny fraction of the $712 million Swiss companies exported to Iran last year.

“It’s peanuts,” says Jeremy P. Carver, a British attorney who has advised governments on implementing sanctions. “It’s not going to really change a thing.”

U.S. officials do not dispute that current amounts of frozen Iranian assets seem small. In some cases, Iran has shifted the money outside the U.S. or EU to avoid sanctions. The officials emphasize that their strategy is not to seize many assets, but to pressure Iran to change its ways by making it extremely difficult for it to do business.

“The strategy is not to freeze as many assets as we can,” says Stuart Levey, the Treasury Department official who has headed the U.S. sanctions initiative during both the Obama and Bush administrations. “That alone, without the full range of measures we can bring to bear, would be a failing strategy.”

…U.S. officials say that still achieves their objective of putting pressure on Iran by making it difficult for it to conduct business. “Every step of the process is going to present obstacles,” says Adam J. Szubin, director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Treasury Department unit that enforces the U.S. sanctions regime. “Some surmountable, some not.”

Adds Mr. Levey, the Treasury official: “The amount of assets frozen does not accurately reflect the tremendous disruptive impact of the range of measures we have imposed.”

Free Iran:  Although it makes some good points, the conclusion of this essay is a typical neocon one – that military strikes are in order.

‘Our aim is not incremental sanctions, but sanctions that will bite.” Thus did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seek to reassure the crowd at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee two weeks ago about the Obama Administration’s resolve on Iran. Three days later, this newspaper reported on its front page that “the U.S. has backed away from pursuing a number of tough measures against Iran” in order to win Russian and Chinese support for one more U.N. sanctions resolution.

The Chinese have indicated that the most they are prepared to support are narrow sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program of the type Tehran has already sneered at. As the Journal’s Peter Fritsch and David Crawford reported this weekend, the Iranians continue to acquire key nuclear components from unsuspecting Western companies via intermediaries, including some Chinese firms.

Yet the Administration still rolls the sanctions rock up the U.N. hill, in a fantastic belief that Russian and Chinese support is vital even if the price is sanctions that are toothless.

…The Administration also argued upon taking office that by making good-faith offers to Iran last year, the U.S. would gain the diplomatic capital needed to steel the world for a tougher approach. Yet a year later the U.S. finds itself begging for U.N. Security Council votes even from such nonpermanent members as Brazil and Turkey, both of which have noticeably improved their ties with Iran in recent months.

The U.S. can at this point do more unilaterally by imposing and enforcing sanctions on companies that do business in Iran’s energy industry. But so far the Administration has shown considerably less enthusiasm for these measures than has even a Democratic Congress.

As for the potential threat of military strikes to assist diplomacy, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has made his doubts about their efficacy very public. The President’s two-week public attempt to humiliate Benjamin Netanyahu has also considerably lessened the perceived likelihood of an Israeli strike on Iran, thereby further diminishing whatever momentum remains for strong sanctions.

All of these actions suggest to us that Mr. Obama has concluded that a nuclear Iran is inevitable, even if he can’t or won’t admit it publicly. Last year Mrs. Clinton floated the idea of expanding the U.S. nuclear umbrella to the entire Middle East if Iran does get the bomb. She quickly backtracked, but many viewed that as an Obama-ian slip.

…President George W. Bush will share responsibility for a nuclear Iran given his own failure to act more firmly against the Islamic Republic or to allow Israel to do so, thereby failing to make good on his pledge not to allow the world’s most dangerous regimes to get the world’s most dangerous weapons. But it is now Mr. Obama’s watch, and for a year he has behaved like a President who would rather live with a nuclear Iran than do what it takes to stop it.

Also:

Boston Globe Editorial:  Move quickly on Iran sanctions

Go to WSJ.