Bush's bid to punish Iranian banks stalls

It's always astonishing to me how little facts seem to effect the behaviour of the Bush administration. For instance, when the NIE recently reported that Iran were not developing a nuclear weapon, one might have been forgiven for thinking that Bush's desire to impose further sanctions upon Tehran had been dealt some kind of devastating blow. But no, Bush has continued to talk of the Iranian threat as is the NIE report simply did not exist.

What's interesting is how other country's are refusing to play Bush game.

The Bush administration's new policy of penalizing Iranian banks is facing a critical challenge as financial institutions in Russia, China and much of the Middle East decline to cut ties, analysts and diplomats say.

Even Afghanistan and Iraq have so far declined to take action against Bank Melli, Iran's largest public financial institution, which was among the first foreign banks to open branches in Kabul and Baghdad.

"Nothing is happening," Sinan Shabibi, governor of the Central Bank of Iraq, said recently by telephone.

The world reaction to the U.S. sanctions on Bank Melli, which operates as Iran's central bank overseas, will determine whether President George W. Bush's new tool against Iran is a failure or a success, analysts say.

It's very strange to see Bush - the supposed leader of the free world - yet again embark on a course of action that many nations simply refuse to follow. Once again, Bush is insisting that reality is what he says it is rather than what the rest of the planet know it to be.

And they're calling him on it:

Russia and China, two of the Security Council members that can veto the move, have called the U.S. bank sanctions arbitrary and unhelpful. President Vladimir Putin of Russia portrayed the blacklisting of Bank Melli as senseless and dangerous, like "running around like a madman with a blade in one's hand."

Wang Baodong, press counselor for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said China did not support the "arbitrary imposition of sanctions."

Bush will, of course, insist that other nations do his bidding; but Putin's analogy of a madman with a blade in his hand has hit home with many people. There are many of us who wonder what the sanctions are for. Bush could reasonably argue that they were needed whilst Iran refused to suspend uranium enrichment, as long as it was supposed that this uranium enrichment was for the procurement of nuclear weapons. Now that his own NIE report has ruled this out, then Bush is arguing that Tehran should have sanctions imposed simply for enriching uranium, which is her right under the NNPT.

Reality might not matter much to zealots like Bush and Cheney, but the rest of the world still cares for such triflings, and Bush is going to find it very hard to get the rest of the world to agree to sanctions now that the NIE have let the cat out of the bag.

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