Fri 26 Oct 2007
Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY
American Imposes ‘Anti-Terror’ Sanctions On Iranian Banks
BushCo.’s decision to step around the UN and impose its own economic sanctions on Iran is about stopping Iran from pursuing its terrorist causes in the Middle East, arming itself with nuclear weapons and threatening Israel.
Right?
Well, that’s what Bush, Cheney and Rice are saying. But is it the full story?
Of course not.
First the news :
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The US slapped tough sanctions on Iran’s military and three state-owned banks overnight, ratcheting up tensions over its nuclear drive and seeking to choke off funds to Tehran.
“These actions will help to protect the international financial system from the illicit activities of the Iranian government,” US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said.
“They will provide a powerful deterrent to every international bank and company that thinks of doing business with the Iranian government.”
The sanctions target Iran’s elite Quds Force, accused by the US of being a supporter of terrorism, as well as the country’s Revolutionary Guards, said to be a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction.
Some 22 Iranian government agencies, three state-owned banks and individuals are also being blacklisted as the United States steps up a drive to squeeze Iran out of the international banking system.
The bolded final half sentence is the key to the whole story. Forget terror, wiping out Israel and nuclear warheads.
The new US sanctions are all about international banking.
But that’s too boring for all of us. So they try to sell us another story. The Big Nuclear Terror story.
But look what Iran has been with its holdings of US Dollars over the past few months, in a series of financial events that culminated only days before the US suddenly announced the new sanctions that have stunned the European Union and raised threats from Russia and China.
Iran has just finished dumping the US Dollar. The Euro, and Russian and Chinese currency will now replace virtually all Iranian transactions, sales and trades formerly pegged to the stumbling, anemic US Dollar :
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Iran has finished the diversification of its assets away from the dollar, reported the Gulf News on Monday. “We have done our best to implement this diversification in both our resources, instruments and forex reserves in order to get maximum out of our assets,” said Tahmasb Maaheri, Iran’s central bank governor, according to the newspaper’s Web site.
Maaheri told Washington-based Emerging Market magazine the process of diversification is almost 100 per cent.
Political tensions with the U.S. and the weakness of the dollar in the past two years “could be cited as two fundamental reasons behind Iran’s move to diversify its assets away from the dollar.”
But Iran is not alone in shoving the US Dollar overboard :
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The Dubai newspaper also pointed out to recent statistics from the U.S. Treasury Department illustrating the position of other Middle Eastern countries in diversifying their reserves.
“The latest data … showed outflows of $163 billion from all forms of U.S. investments in August,” reported the paper.
Asian investors are now selling wads of US Treasury bonds, that is US debt, valued in the tens of billions of dollars. In August alone, investors from China, Taiwan and Japan got rid of $US52 billion.
We are told US sanctions will isolate Iran. They will do no such thing. Iran will just increase the amount of business it does with China, Russia, India, Afghanistan and Pakistan instead.
If you want to be really cynical about it, you could well say that the US only imposed these sanctions because they knew Iran was getting out of the US Dollar business, and wanted to look like they were playing tough when they’re actually doing nothing of the sort.
Read the front page news, but always take a quick flick through the financial pages. That’s usually where the real story is buried.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Says Iran With Nuclear Weapons Poses ‘No Existential Threat’
Financial Times : Bush Heads For Dreadful Miscalculation Over Iran
