EMET Applauds Senate’s Comprehensive Iran Sanctions Bill
The United States Senate has unanimously passed the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2009, S. 2799. The legislation incorporates a number of Iran-focused Senate initiatives including petroleum sanctions based on the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act S. 908, originally sponsored by Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN), Sen. Lieberman (I-CT), Sen. Kyl (R-AZ), and others.
The bill prohibits the government from purchasing goods from companies which do business with Iran’s energy sector.
It also closes U.S markets to a number of Iranian products which were exempted from existing sanctions by President Bill Clinton, including Iranian made carpets, among others.
The Senate bill does provide the president with the authority to waive the application of sanctions if he determines such a waiver to be in the national interest, and by certifying to Congress the reasoning behind the waiver.
The legislation also includes divestment language to authorize local and state governments to divest from Iran, as well as to provide safe harbor for private fund managers who divest from Iran.
In a letter to President Obama written the day prior to the bill’s Senate passage a bipartisan coalition of senators including Sens. Bayh, Lieberman, Kyl wrote,
“We are convinced that 2010 will be the pivotal year in determining whether Iran is allowed to acquire a nuclear weapons capability. Ultimately, it will be our choices that determine whether we are able to avert this tremendous threat to global peace and stability. We abhor the possibility that military action may be necessary to solve this problem. But we have no doubt that a nuclear-armed Iran will be catastrophic for our national security and the rule-based international order. In fact, we believe that at stake is nothing less than the entire global nonproliferation regime; this point is all the more important as we head into the 2010 review of the NPT. We must therefore exhaust every possible non-military means at our disposal to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.
The Senate version of the bill will still need to be reconciled with the House version, H.R. 2194, which passed 412 to 2 before being sent to the White House for the President’s signature. The House version was originally sponsored by Rep. Berman (D- CA) and Rep. Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), among others. Both versions target Iranian petroleum imports, which are widely seen as the Iranian regime’s Achilles’ heel. Iran imports about 40% of its gasoline supplies because of a lack of refinery capability.
Overall, the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act contains much of the legislation that those concerned with the rising belligerency of Iran have sought for some time. EMET urges the Congress to move quickly to see the Iran bills through conference committee and signed into law. We applaud the work being done by Secretary of State Clinton to bring Europe and well as China and Russia into an effective sanctions regime. Multilateral cooperation from Iran’s trading partners is vital. Whatever the outcome of the multilateral track however, we urge President Obama to make the most of all available tools, and implement unilateral sanctions fully in order to prevent the unimaginable, a nuclear-armed Iran.