President Bush was under no illusions about the threat a nuclear-armed, militant Islamist regime in Tehran would pose. But during two terms in the White House, he took no serious steps to prevent this capability from steadily developing.
President Obama also does not appear to be under any illusions. "Iran's development of a nuclear weapon, I believe, is unacceptable," he said during his first post-election press conference.
The Obama administration's initial response was to pursue "direct diplomatic engagement" with Iran. But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, traveling in the Middle East this week, reportedly told an Arab foreign minister that it now seems "very doubtful" that such an approach will succeed. Significant pressure will be required to persuade Iran's ruling mullahs to give up their nuclear ambitions -- not to mention their support of terrorist groups abroad and their egregious human rights violations at home.
But, short of military action, what leverage can Obama exert? He could cut off the flow of gasoline to Iran. Indeed, this is an approach for which Obama has expressed support on at least three occasions. "If we can prevent them from importing the gasoline that they need," he said during a campaign debate in October, "that starts changing their cost-benefit analysis. That starts putting the squeeze on them."
Iran is one of the world's leading oil exporters but it has not invested much in oil refineries -- it has spent its money on nuclear development instead. As a result, Iran must import almost half the gasoline it consumes. Just a few companies have been filling its tanks. The most important of them is Vitol, a Swiss firm.
Last Friday, a bipartisan group of House members -- Howard Berman, Brad Sherman, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Robert Wexler, Mark Kirk, Rob Andrews and Edward Royce -- sent a letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, asking him to reconsider a federal government contract awarded to Vitol in January, just days before the Bush administration left office.
They noted that Vitol has a checkered history, for example, pleading guilty, in 2007, "to grand larceny in New York state court in connection with kickbacks to the Iraqi government" in the Oil-for-Food scandal orchestrated by Saddam Hussein. That alone, the congressmen wrote, "could provide sufficient grounds for debarment from federal contracting."
Orde Kittrie, a former State Department official and now a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (the think tank I run) notes that in recent days, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has announced that Iran has stockpiled enough nuclear fuel to make a bomb, and that Iran has launched a satellite. "We are five minutes from midnight in terms of opportunities to stop Iran from acquiring the capacity to launch a nuclear-armed missile," Kittrie says. "The time is now to change Iran's cost-benefit analysis by cutting off its supply of imported gasoline. One very important step in that direction would be to put Vitol to a choice between selling to Iran and selling to the United States."
If nothing else this would send the mullahs a message that there are non-military ways to cause them discomfort -- even without the participation of the UN and European governments. A shortage of imported gasoline would further weaken Iran's already unhealthy economy. Faced with that prospect, the ruling mullahs would ask themselves the question that is always foremost on their minds: "What best protects our hold on power?"
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