[Peace-discuss] Realists over neocons on Iran

[C. G. Estabrook]

	September 27, 2008
	Iran Resolution Shelved in Rare Defeat for AIPAC
	by Jim Lobe

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 nonbinding, 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 program."

Although the resolution's sponsors explicitly denied it – indeed, one clause 
stated that "nothing in this resolution shall be construed as an authorization 
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 program.

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 UN 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 wording 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 behavior,'' his spokesperson told the 
Times.  (Inter Press Service)