WASHINGTON — A nuclear-armed Iran would be a nightmare scenario
marking the death knell of the Arab-Israeli peace process and global
non-proliferation efforts, experts said Monday as US lawmakers sought
tighter sanctions.
As the European Union beefed up its own
sanctions regime on Tehran, US Senator Mark Kirk and others unveiled a
bill that would boost enforcement of existing sanctions, bring fresh
pressure on Iran's oil sector and military, and shine a spotlight on
the regime's poor human rights record.
The bilateral legislation,
called the Iran, North Korea and Syria Sanctions Consolidation Act of
2011, aims to increase pressure on companies still doing business with
Iran's energy industry, notably Chinese firms that are on existing US
lists of violators but have not been sanctioned.
"What we ought
to do is enforce the sanctions that are already on the books," Kirk
told the annual meeting of the powerful pro-Israel lobby AIPAC.
The
bill would expand an asset freeze on companies selling conventional
military goods or technology to Iran, North Korea or Syria, and would
also "put forward dramatically tougher sanctions against Iran's
Republican Guard," he added.
The sanctions, which need congressional approval, would also target Iranian banks involved in such sales.
Brad
Gordon, a former CIA analyst on Iran and now the director of policy and
government affairs for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee,
said Washington must come down harder on violators, pointing to a
steady rise in refined petroleum deliveries to Iran in recent months
after a sharp drop last year following introduction of sanctions by US
President Barack Obama.
"If you don't pull the trigger on a
sanction that's meaningful, eventually companies get the notion that
we're not serious about this and begin to go back in," Gordon told the
AIPAC delegates.
New sanctions, he said, "allows us to refocus
attention on Iran" in the midst of dramatic changes in the Middle East,
including the sweeping away of dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt,
civil war in Libya and unrest in Syria and Yemen that have dominated
foreign policy debate.
"Tehran acquiring the bomb," he said, "is
very likely the death knell of the peace process," with Israel
hamstrung on making concessions on the West Bank, "knowing that Hamas
backed by Iranian nuclear weapons could take over."
He said a
nuclear arms race in the Middle East would mean 60 years of US efforts
to contain nuclear weapons "will be in vain," and the chances of
nuclear terror would increase "exponentially."
Former Israeli
deputy national security adviser Chuck Freilich said that with some
dozen Arab countries already announcing "civil" nuclear programs of
their own, "a multi-nuclear Middle East is a nightmare which the world
does not know how to deal with."
Unlike the US-Soviet
confrontation, a possible Iran-Israel face-off and a nuclear Middle
East "doesn't threaten the very future of humanity," Freilich said.
"But in terms of the political complexity... the US-Soviet confrontation really pales in comparison." AFP
