Countdown to a Showdown: Part II

Jan. 25, 2006 - Congressman Robert Andrews, a Democrat from New Jersey, and Mark Steven Kirk, a Republican from Illinois, made a proposal on the floor of the House last June that, as far as I can tell, sank without a trace. We’ve heard nothing about it from the administration since, and when I’ve raised it with several experts on Iran they say it’s potentially counterproductive, possibly very dangerous. But with tensions between the mullahs and the rest of the world continuing to grow because of Iran’s nuclear research, maybe it’s time to take another look at what these congressmen described as a “surgical sanction.”

“I find the current U.S. policy debate on Iran is too simplistic,” Kirk, who still serves in the U.S. Navy Reserves, told the House. “It is just two-dimensional: either let Iran have the bomb, putting the Middle East under a nuclear hair trigger, or let Israel do it”—that is, try to blow the hell out of Iran’s installations—“and have another war.” (For the record, Iran says its intentions are entirely peaceful.) Is there another way to stop the spiral toward Armageddon? Kirk and Andrews think so. “Iran has a unique vulnerability,” Kirk told the House, “one that opens a new window of diplomacy that could help us achieve all of our objectives without a shot being fired.”

That “Achilles’ heel of the Iranian autocrats,” said Andrews, picking up the theme across the aisle, is gasoline. The mullahs “have presided over such a dysfunctional country that they are in a situation where they sell crude oil in huge amounts to the rest of the world but import gasoline.”  As mentioned in this column a couple of weeks ago, the International Energy Agency, which monitors global supply and demand, reported last year that Iran had a 60 percent shortfall in gasoline production while burning up 10 per cent of its GDP subsidizing prices of less than 40 cents a gallon.

Using a word borrowed from the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the congressmen proposed a “quarantine” to stop ships taking gasoline to Iran and, in Kirk’s phrase, “quickly implode her economy.”

The two congressmen say they’re thinking outside the box. Some critics of the idea, which has also been floated by Iranian exile groups, think they’re just out of their minds. Pierre Terzian, the sage behind the Petrostrategies group of oil-industry analysts in Paris, laughed when I mentioned the possibility of a gasoline embargo on the Iranian regime. “That would  help the [Iranian] government a lot,” he says. “They’ve been trying for many years now to increase the price.” They know the enormous subsidies on gasoline are ruinous to their economy, but none of the mullahs has had the political guts to address the issue head on. “This way,” says Terzian, “they could blame it all on the foreigners.”

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