UN: U.S. Failed to Report Iran's Violations of Sanctions. More White House duplicity on Iran.

UN: U.S. Failed to Report Iran's Violations of Sanctions

Lee Smith

June 9, 2015 

A UN panel says that the White House and other Western governments have neglected to report Iranian violations of the sanctions regime.

“The current situation with reporting could reflect a general reduction of procurement activities by the Iranian side or a political decision by some member states to refrain from reporting to avoid a possible negative impact on ongoing negotiations” between Iran and the P5+1, the UN panel said in its June 1 report, and made public today.

“This is a clear political decision not to publicize these examples of sanctions evasion in order to ensure that public reporting on this doesn’t in any way jeopardize the talks or harden congressional resolve,” executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies Mark Dubowitz told Bloomberg Business. “The Obama administration has bent over backwards to try and whitewash Iranian violations both on the nuclear side and also on the sanction-busting side.”

A possibility raised in an AP piece this afternoon is that the White House has put itself in a position where it has no choice but to look the other way. As Matt Lee and Bradley Klapper report, it will be very difficult for the White House to disentangle the nuclear-related sanctions on Iran from other sanctions, like those related to terrorism, or ballistic missile research. The Iranian Central Bank, as the article explains, may prove the most glaring example of the administration's dilemma.

The bank underpins Iran's entire economy, and for years the U.S. avoided hitting it with sanctions, fearing such action would spread financial instability and spike oil prices. By late 2011, with Iran's nuclear program advancing rapidly, Obama and Congress did order penalties, declaring the bank a "primary money laundering concern" and linking its activity to ballistic missile research, terror financing and support for Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The effects were far-reaching. Petroleum exports fell by 60 percent, Iran suffered runaway inflation, cash reserves dried up and industrial output in several sectors plummeted. And Iran agreed to talk about its nuclear program with the United States and five other world powers.

Now that the nuclear agreement is so close, Iran wants these sanctions lifted. And it is unclear how the United States and other Western powers could feasibly provide the economic benefits they've promised without easing conditions on the central bank.

Counter to the White House’s demurrals, eliminating the non-nuclear related sanctions would provide an enormous windfall for the clerical regime in Tehran and its regional allies, including Hezbollah and Iraqi Shiite terrorist groups with American blood on their hands.