Clinton krijgt de hik

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

De 'Yes We Can' regering heeft zijn handen vol aan het in diskrediet
brengen van de Iraanse regering ;)

Eerst is het opzetje van de Mossad (waar Obama trouwens niet van wist)
om de verkiezingen te laten mislukken niet gelukt, zaten de S300
raketten niet in het schip met de boomstammen voor Algerije, en
verdommen ze het om hun energiehuishouding onder curatele te laten zetten.

Nu weer dat de bevolking moet worden gered van een staatsgreep van de
Nationale Garde.

Is dit voor Nationale Consumptie? Of toch Buitenlands beleid?

Groet / Cees

February 16, 2010
Clinton Cites U.S. Concerns of Military Power in Iran
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/world/middleeast/16diplo.html
By MARK LANDLER

DOHA, Qatar — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Monday
that the United States feared Iran was drifting toward a military
dictatorship, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps seizing
control of large swaths of Iran’s political, military, and economic
establishment.

“That is how we see it,” Mrs. Clinton said in a televised town hall
meeting of students at the Doha campus of Carnegie Mellon University.
“We see that the government in Iran, the supreme leader, the president,
the Parliament, is being supplanted and that Iran is moving towards a
military dictatorship.”

The United States, she said, was tailoring a new set of tougher United
Nations sanctions to target the Revolutionary Guards Corps, which
controls Iran’s nuclear program and which she said had increasingly
marginalized the country’s clerical and political leadership.

Mrs. Clinton’s remarks were remarkably blunt, given her audience in
Qatar, a Persian Gulf emirate with close ties to Iran. But they build on
the administration’s recent strategy of branding the corps as an
“entitled class” that is the principal menace in Iran.

The United States, Mrs. Clinton said, would protect its allies in the
gulf from Iranian aggression — a pledge that echoed the idea of a
“security umbrella” that she advanced last summer in Asia. She noted
that the United States already supplied defensive weapons to several of
these countries, and was prepared to bolster its military assistance if
necessary.

“We will always defend ourselves, and we will always defend our friends
and allies, and we will certainly defend countries who are in the Gulf
who face the greatest immediate nearby threat from Iran,” she said. “We
also are talking at length with a lot of our friends in the Gulf about
what they need defensively in the event that Iran pursues its nuclear
ambitions.”

Pressed repeatedly by an audience of mainly Muslim students, Mrs.
Clinton said the United States had no plans to carry out a military
strike against Iran.

Still, as the Obama administration moves from diplomacy to pressure, its
policy is edging closer to the hard line toward Iran that Mrs. Clinton
advocated as a presidential candidate. At times on this trip, her public
comments have sounded a lot like her words on the campaign trail.

Asked about the so-called “security umbrella” — a phrase that Mrs.
Clinton first used during the Democratic primary and which the White
House did not embrace after she mentioned it in Thailand last summer —
she said she still believed it was the best way to counter the Iranian
threat.

Iran’s neighbors, she said, had three options. “They can just give in to
the threat; or they can seek their own capabilities, including nuclear;
or they ally themselves with a country like the United States that is
willing to help defend them.”

“I think the third is by far the preferable option,” she said.

In targeting the Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Obama administration is
also trying to drive a wedge between ordinary Iranians and a privileged
and corrupt ruling class. Speaking to reporters as she flew from Qatar
to Saudi Arabia later on Monday, Mrs. Clinton emphasized this rift.

“I think the trend with this greater and greater military lock on
leadership decisions should be disturbing to Iranians as well as to
those of us on the outside,” she said.

Last week, the Treasury Department froze the assets within its
jurisdiction of four companies controlled by the Revolutionary Guards,
as well as those of Gen. Rostam Qasemi, a commander who oversees the
Revolutionary Guards’ construction and engineering conglomerate, Khatam
al-Anbiya.

In Saudi Arabia, Mrs. Clinton was expected to meet with King Abdullah at
his desert retreat outside Riyadh. Officials said she would raise the
issue of Saudi Arabia offering guarantees to China that it would offset
any disruptions in oil supplies that could occur if China were to
support sanctions against Iran.

Her comments on Monday underscored the Obama administration’s
determination to single out the elite corps as a way to curb Iran’s
nuclear program.

The administration is also working on a series of sanctions that would
publicly single out the corps’ vast array of companies, banks and other
entities.

The latest designations, which come two and a half years after the
United States first imposed sanctions on the corps, illustrate both the
scope and limitations of the president’s pressure campaign.

Senior White House officials described what they said would be a
“systematic” effort to drive a wedge between the Iranian population and
the Revolutionary Guards, which the West says is responsible for running
Iran’s nuclear program and also has a record of supporting militant
Islamist organizations and cracking down on antigovernment protesters.

In putting together a United Nations Security Council resolution that
names specific companies and the wide web of assets owned by the Guards
— assets that include even the Tehran airport — the administration is
hoping to substantially increase pressure on the organization, which one
senior administration official described as a new “entitled class” in Iran.

“We have bent over backwards to say to the Islamic Republic of Iran that
we are willing to have a constructive conversation about how they can
align themselves with international norms and rules and re-enter as full
members of the international community,” Mr. Obama said in a news
conference last Tuesday. “They have made their choice so far.”

The United States, Mr. Obama said, will be working on “developing a
significant regime of sanctions that will indicate to them how isolated
they are from the international community as a whole.”

The goal would be to increase the cost for those who do business with
Iran so much that they would cut off ties.

Previous resolutions have designated a handful of senior figures in the
Iranian nuclear program, including the man believed to run much of the
military research program for the Revolutionary Guards. But the
administration’s latest push would name dozens, if not hundreds, of
companies.

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