US Sanctions Iran Military Revolutionary Guard

On Thursday the US sanctions Iran’s military Revolutionary Guard as Washington accuses the Revolutionary Guard, its elite Quds Force and several Iranian banks and companies of supporting nuclear proliferation and terror-related activities.

The sanctions measures, announced Thursday by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, are the first time the U.S. has attempted to punish another country’s military through sanctions. As far as I know proclaiming a sovereign nation’s military as a terrorist organization has never been done before by any nation.

Russia and China were not pleased by the US action. “Dialogue and negotiations are the best approach to resolving the Iranian nuclear issue,” China’s foreign ministry said in a brief statement to The Associated Press. “To impose new sanctions on Iran at a time when international society and the Iranian authorities are working hard to find a solution to the Iranian nuclear issue can only complicate the issue.”

Russian’s President Vladimir Putin was more blunt in his comments. Putin said Thursday that the Kremlin would not back new international sanctions, AP reported. “Why worsen the situation and bring it to a dead end by threatening sanctions or military action?” Putin went on to say say in comments apparently directed directly at the U.S. “Running around like a madman with a razor blade, waving it around, is not the best way to resolve the situation.”

The US sanctions without a doubt ratchet up tensions between Iran and the US, as well as widen the growing differences between the US and China and Russia. The Bush administration doesn’t seem to care very much what other nations think. Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, has criticized U.S. rhetoric on Iran and said last month that Iran’s declared nuclear material has not been diverted from peaceful use.

The BBC’s Justin Webb in Washington says US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continues to be committed to finding a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian crisis.

However, he goes on to say that Vice-President Dick Cheney is widely believed to be pressing for a military strike on Iran before the Bush administration’s term is over, and if these sanctions have no effect, Ms Rice may well have to give way to his strategy of an attack upon Iran.

The US rhetoric and increasing of tensions is for me taking on the unpleasant smell of the odor that originated in the White House before the invasion of Iraq. I hope that it’s my nose that’s out of order. A US attack on Iran may well in my opinion have unforeseen consequences that will place the entire world as we know it today in grave danger.

For one thing, the list of nations on this planet still friendly to the US would become very short indeed. While the US may still think of itself as the world’s only superpower the difficulties that we have experienced in controlling events in Iraq and Afghanistan should give the Bush administration reason to pause and to think long and hard before engaging in additional conflicts.

Our military, as powerful of a conventional force that it is, has been tied down for over five years by a relatively small rag tag bunch of insurgents and an even smaller rag tag group of radical Islamic terrorists. To force the issue with Iran at this time may lead to powerful conventional forces being aligned against the US as well as spark worldwide terrorist strikes against US interests not only abroad but on American soil.     

Even a superpower can overreach. Unfortunately, that tendency seems to be the history of every superpower that has ever thought that it has become invincible. In my opinion, an attack upon Iran would put that invincibility to a severe test. While we could choose the moment of initial attack and inflict heavy damage to Iran’s military and infrastructure we would be unable to deliver a knockout punch by air and could not control when the conflict might end or the extent that it might spread.

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