The Israel Lobby That Couldn’t Shoot Straight on Iran

By Andrew I. Killgore

“President Clinton’s senior foreign policy advisers met late into the night [on March 3] grappling with what might have seemed a straightforward decision: whether to impose legally mandated sanctions on French, Russian and Malaysian oil companies that are developing a major offshore gas field in Iran.”—Thomas W. Lippman, The Washington Post, March 6, 1998

Not mentioned in Tom Lippman’s Washington Post article, a portion of which is quoted above, is that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright herself was one of President Clinton’s “senior foreign policy advisers” who grappled with whether to impose sanctions on three foreign oil companies doing business in Iran. Also unmentioned is that “late into the night” meant after midnight, according to Vahan Zanoyan, a senior analyst at the Petroleum Finance Company in Washington.

Nor does the Lippman article mention Israel or AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), Israel’s fearsome Washington lobby, perhaps because to describe its role in creating this nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue would make that bullying behemoth look more comical than fearsome. And any bully who’s laughed at loses part of his power to intimidate.

Essentially the story here, which the Israel-leaning Post editors might have clarified for their readers, but chose not to, is that the right hand of the Israel lobby in Washington doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. Like journalist/author Jimmy Breslin’s book/movie about some “comical 12th rate New York City crooks,” AIPAC can’t shoot straight.

Back to the series of events that led to the March 3 midnight oil burning. Five years earlier, in March of 1993, Washington Post journalist David Hoffman revealed that Israel was focusing all of its vaunted powers of persuasion on convincing the United States that Iran’s extremism (read “terrorism”) and rearmament drive were destabilizing the Middle East and threatening Western interests.

Two years later, in April 1995, President Clinton announced a trade embargo against Iran, charging that Tehran was seeking to obtain nuclear weapons. The two-year lapse of time between the Israeli “persuasion” campaign and Clinton’s trade embargo order meant, given the president’s reliance on pro-Israel financial and media support, that he didn’t really see much danger, but decided to go ahead anyway for domestic political purposes.

In 1996 Senate Banking Committee Chairman Alfonse D’Amato (R-NY) sponsored a bill requiring the president to impose sanctions on any foreign company investing $20 million or more in one year to develop the oil industries of Iran or Libya. This is the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, or ILSA. (ILSA is no lady, despite the charming name.)

D’Amato may be Israel’s most slavish supporter in Congress. He might, therefore, be called a senior executive of AIPAC II, the State Department and White House being AIPAC I.

But a question. Or really several questions. Did AIPAC I, the executive side of the government, caution AIPAC II, the legislative side, that the Iranians had established several great empires in the past and that these prideful people might be disinclined to give in to American/Israeli intimidation on developing their vital oil/gas industry?

Hubris Governs

Or are AIPAC I and AIPAC II so taken with their power position in the Clinton/Gore administration that pure hubris governs their actions? Or is it not a form of arrogance at all, but rather that the Israelists—Hebrew-speaking political appointees who have lived or studied in Israel—now running U.S. Middle East policy from the State Department, and their allies in the White House, are simply geopolitical ignoramuses who don’t understand that the United States doesn’t rule the world? And most especially not the Islamic one-fifth of the world’s population who have concluded that arrogance has become even more American than apple pie.

In any case, trouble started appearing on the horizon last summer, when TOTAL S.A. of France, Russia’s giant natural gas company Gazprom and Malaysia’s Petronas contracted to invest $2 billion to develop Iran’s huge offshore South Pars gas field. Does it violate ILSA?

Experienced oil consultant Zanoyan told journalist Lippman that the three-company deal to develop South Pars clearly is sanctionable. Later he confirmed to the Washington Report the South Pars contract’s vulnerability to sanctions. Zanoyan added, however, that, “Iran doesn’t need the United States.” That means that whatever the U.S. tries to do, it cannot force the Iranian government to do business with Israel, which is behind Israel’s five-year-old campaign to turn Tehran’s Islamist regime into a bugaboo.

So what did the foreign policy brass of the world’s only remaining superpower decide to do about ILSA? Essentially to do nothing and play for time. That is better than trying to enforce its ill-conceived law and finding itself in a knock-down, drag-out trade war with the Europeans. Which the U.S. would surely lose.

Apparently the early morning White House decision was that it was safer domestic politics, which is all that this administration cares about, to continue pretending that ILSA is a viable policy, no matter how silly it makes the U.S. look overseas, than to admit it has failed and that both AIPACs I and II have shot themselves in the foot.

Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.