"America's hostile policy to the Iranian people and the country's legal institutions are against international law. They are worthless and ineffective, and doomed to failure", Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Mohammad Ali Hosseini told a media conference in Tehran on October 25.
Hosseini made the comments in response to the announcement earlier that day by US President George Bush that he was imposing financial sanctions on 20 Iranian companies, banks and individuals as well as Iran's defence ministry, labelling them "supporters of terrorism".
The October 26 New York Times observed that while the decision "raised the temperature in America's ongoing confrontation with Iran over terrorism and nuclear weapons", it "represents a tacit acknowledgment that the diplomatic strategy pressed most vigorously by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been ineffective, and it prompted fresh criticism on Thursday from Russia: 'Why make the situation worse, bring it to a dead end, threaten sanctions or even military action?' President Vladimir V. Putin asked, in a report by Agence France-Presse."
The NYT noted that Washington "clearly hopes to enlist allies around the world in its new, tougher stance — in part because the United States, having maintained its own stiff sanctions against Iran since the Islamic revolution in 1979, does not have much leverage left itself ...
"Yet officials acknowledged that past attempts to enlist allies in limiting their business ties to Iran have come up short. In each instance, they acknowledged, some other countries have partly offset the sanctions ... analysts pointed out that Russian, Indian, European and even Canadian companies continued to do business with many different sectors of the Iranian economy, particularly its all important oil and natural gas industries."
As part of laying the propaganda groundwork for a planned future Iraq-style regime-change invasion of Iran, Washington has alleged for many years now that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program.
No evidence of nukes
No evidence has been presented by US officials to support this allegation. Mohammed ElBaradei, the director-general of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitors Iran's nuclear program, has repeatedly reported that his inspectors have found no evidence of any Iranian nuclear weapons program.
In September, ElBaradei told the IAEA's 51st general conference that his inspectors had "been able to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran" to any military purposes. "Iran", he added, "has continued to provide the access and reporting needed to enable agency verification in this regard".
Associated Press reported on September 29 that, "In a setback for the United States, Iran won a two-month reprieve from new UN sanctions over its nuclear program on Friday. The Bush administration and its European allies ceded to Russian and Chinese demands to give Tehran more time to address international concerns" about its past nuclear activities.
Washington, backed by London and Paris, used these concerns to pressure the UN Security Council into imposing two rounds of limited financial sanctions on Iran in December and March, demanding that it halt research into uranium enrichment.
Iran has refused to do so, pointing out that this demand contravenes its right under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and its IAEA safeguards agreement to enrich uranium to fuel nuclear power plants.
Following talks in September between the foreign ministers of the five permanent members of the Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the US — plus Germany, Iran's largest trading partner, Washington and its EU allies agreed to delay consideration of a new sanctions resolution until mid-November.
Washington's announcement of "new" sanctions against Iran is aimed at pressuring all of its Western allies to go further than the limited UN-imposed sanctions, restricting Iran's ability to get international trade credits. However, on the day after Bush's announcement, Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer told Reuters that the EU, Japan and Australia would wait "for a little while" to see if further progress eventuated in negotiations with Iran on the nuclear issue.
While the British and French governments welcomed the US sanctions announcement, AP reported on October 27 that "few other European nations [are] clamoring to support stepped-up EU sanctions".
The October 29 Washington Post reported that "Iran has been steadily shifting its trade from West to East and, with the benefit of record high oil prices, is likely to be able to withstand the new US sanctions, according to US, European and Iranian analysts.
"China, a permanent member of the Security Council that can veto any UN resolution, is expected to overtake Germany as Iran's biggest trading partner this year ...
"Iran's oil revenue this year will far exceed the government's budget forecasts, which had assumed an average oil price of [US]$60 a barrel. On Friday, oil settled above $90. The extra revenue will make it easier for the government to maintain social-services payments designed to bolster its popularity amid economic problems."
Ironically, it is Washington's anti-Iran sabre-rattling that has been a major factor in driving up the price of crude oil.
In an October 28 interview with CNN, ElBaradei said he had "not received any information" from his inspectors that Iran seeks to build a nuclear weapon. He also accused US leaders of adding "fuel to the fire" with their bellicose rhetoric about Iran.
Asked about ElBaradei's statements while in Abu Dhabi on October 29, French defence minister Herve Morin said: "Our information, which is backed up by other countries, is contrary." However, he declined to elaborate on his "information".
"If ElBaradei is right", Morin added, "then there is no reason that Iran stops ElBaradei and the IAEA from carrying out inspections. If [Iran's nuclear program] is only civil, what would be the reason to stop international inspections?"
In fact, Iran has allowed the full range of inspections under its legally binding 1974 IAEA safeguards agreement. What Morin was disingenuously referring to was Iran's termination last December, after the Security Council imposed limited sanctions on it, of "go-anywhere, anytime" IAEA inspections that it had voluntarily allowed after December 2003.
Addressing delegates to the UN General Assembly on October 29, ElBaradei noted that in August his agency and Iran had produced a "work plan for resolving all outstanding verification issues" related to Iran's nuclear program. He called the agreement an "important step in the right direction".
Quds Force
On the same day that Bush announced Washington's "new" financial sanctions against Iran, the US State Department listed the 15,000 Quds (Jerusalem) Force of Iran's 125,000-strong Revolutionary Guard Corps, the elite force of Iran's military, as a "terrorist" organisation.
The effect of this move, like the financial sanctions announcement, is largely symbolic. Washington has for many years accused Iran of being the world's major state sponsor of terrorism because of its support for Lebanon's Hezbollah-led resistance to the illegal Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory.
Since January, the US military command in Iraq has accused the Quds Force of providing training and weapons, particularly armour-piercing EFPs (explosively formed penetrators), to the Mahdi Army militia of Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr. No credible evidence has been provided for these claims. In fact, the US military has forensic evidence that the EFPs used against its vehicles had been manufactured in Iraq, not Iran.
In late November 2006, a senior US intelligence official told both CNN and the New York Times that Lebanon's Hezbollah, not Iran's Quds Force, had provided 2000 Mahdi Army fighters with the training to use EFPs.
Blaming Iran for the deaths of US occupation troops in Iraq fits in with Washington's propaganda drive to present Iran as a threat to the lives of ordinary US citizens — a threat requiring a future "preventative" regime change war.
However, in the wake of Washington's ongoing and disastrous war in Iraq, support for any military attack on Iran has little support among US voters. An opinion poll conducted in September for Foreign Affairs, the journal of the US establishment's Council on Foreign Relations, found that only 19% of US voters supported military action against Iran; two-thirds were opposed.
Echoing that public sentiment, former US Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, who is now a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for American Progress, told the October 28 Cincinnati Post: "It's just preposterous to me that we would look for yet another military intervention. I think that it's very hard to justify, given how badly stretched our military is, how challenged we are to find the resources to do what we're already doing in Afghanistan and Iraq."