US and allies eye sanctions on Iran regime

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration and its European allies are exploring ways to enact ''targeted sanctions" against the Iranian regime, including banning international travel by its leaders and freezing their bank accounts as well as preventing international airlines from flying to Tehran, according to European diplomats and US officials.

The steps are among the package of international actions that could be taken at the UN Security Council in March to pressure Iran to give up uranium enrichment activities. Diplomats and regional specialists said President Bush and his counterparts want to find ways to target the regime without directly punishing ordinary Iranians, as widespread economic sanctions or an oil boycott might do.

''That is one principle that everybody would like to stick by," said a Washington-based European diplomat who focuses on Iran, adding that technical questions remain about how such individualized sanctions would work. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the preliminary nature of the talks.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice alluded to the possibility of banning international travel by Iran's leaders when she told the House International Relations Committee on Thursday that Iran has ''a leadership that travels."

''We're going to look at anything particularly that might have an effect on the Iranian regime's ability to do business," Rice said. ''Iran, I do not believe, can endure the kind of international isolation that, for instance, North Korea endures."

Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank, said such limited measures are attractive because they could find broad support on the Security Council, where Russia and China -- who have veto powers in the body -- have been reluctant to impose widespread economic embargoes.

''For specific sanctions -- freezing bank accounts of senior leaders, stopping international air carriers from serving Tehran -- I think we can gain consensus," Rubin wrote in an e-mail response to questions from the Globe. ''After all, China doesn't have flights [to Iran], so it's a nonissue for them."

Rubin said the Bush administration was studying travel bans as one way to ''impact the morale of the people toward their government" by showing that their leaders are unwelcome in the rest of the world.

But he said he doubts such measures would be enough to prompt Tehran to give up its enrichment programs. ''The Iranian regime sees nuclear weapons as a key to the regime's political survival," he said.

Iran maintains that its programs are purely for research and nuclear power and that they are legal under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. But the United States and a growing number of European countries accuse Iran of trying to build a nuclear bomb and of violating the treaty by hiding key nuclear activities from inspectors.

The UN's atomic energy watchdog reported Iran to the Security Council earlier this month after Iran ended a 2 1/2-year voluntary suspension of research on uranium enrichment.

It's unclear what kind of impact a travel ban would have on the leadership in Tehran.

In January, Iran's hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, proposed direct flights between Iran and the United States, but in other comments he has indicated that he views isolation as a way to stop corrupting influences of the West.

Recently, Ahmadinejad's own travel plans appear to be limited to certain countries, such as a recent meeting in Syria and an upcoming summit in Cuba. He already may have difficulty visiting Europe, where his public denials of the Holocaust violate laws in several countries.

While countries debate possible sanctions, international pressure has already raised the cost of doing business with Tehran.

Zurich's UBS bank announced in January that it has asked its clients living in Iran to close their accounts because it was becoming too expensive to vouch for the origin of the funds.

The Washington-based European diplomat said his government is studying a range of measures that could be applied against Iran. If travel and banking sanctions are enacted and fail to change Iran's behavior, he said, punishment could escalate over time to such tougher actions as a ban on investment in Iran's oil industry or even an oil embargo, which would raise gasoline prices worldwide.

''To take out a chunk of the oil supply is not what anybody would want, but if that's what it would take to change Iranian behavior, you can't rule that out," he said.

But he, too, wondered whether even the harshest measures would produce a change in Iran. ''We may go through the whole range of sanctions and they still refuse to change behavior," he said.

It is still unclear what kind of measures Russia and China would endorse. When the International Atomic Energy Agency referred Iran's case to the Security Council, both countries supported the move with the caveat that no action would be taken until March to give time to persuade Iran to stop enriching its own uranium for its nuclear projects and instead rely on uranium enriched in Russia.

Both countries have huge financial stakes in Iran, the world's fourth-largest producer of oil.

Russia, one of the largest suppliers of military equipment to Iran, has built a nuclear reactor in Iran to generate power. China, a voracious consumer of Iranian oil, is in the final stages of a $100 billion deal allowing China Petrochemical to develop Iran's Yadavaran oil field.

Any tough economic sanctions against Iran must also include India, which is negotiating a multibillion-dollar pipeline deal with Tehran and which provides 40 percent of Iran's refined gasoline.

European diplomats said that if the Security Council opted against tough action against Iran, the Europe Union could apply economic sanctions. But one diplomat described such a move as a less attractive ''contingency plan" because it would not have the UN stamp and would signal a lack of unity on the issue.

Germany, which exports parts and machinery for Tehran's Volkswagen factory, supports the idea of targeted sanctions and has not ruled out tougher measures. France, also a leading supplier of automotive parts to Tehran, has also hardened its position.

The United States has had almost no diplomatic contact since the 1979 hostage crisis, so there is little Washington can do on its own to further punish the regime. One possibility would be to cut off the trickle of imports from Iran, which last year amounted to about $174 million worth of caviar, rugs, and pistachios.

Another option is to begin enforcing a 1996 law that would punish foreign companies that invest in Iran's oil infrastructure, as many in Congress are advocating. But such a move would anger key European allies.

Rice predicted that it will be very difficult to agree on what action to take against Iran, ''particularly trying to maintain a coalition around a set of robust steps."

For Iran's part, a top Iranian diplomat said in a recent interview that it is not the first time that the world has united against his country. He said that members of the Security Council sided with Saddam Hussein, Iran's archenemy, during the Iran-Iraq war, which lasted from 1980 to 1988.

''We survived it, and now we are the most powerful country in the region," said an Iranian diplomat who asked not to be identified because the nuclear issue is being dealt with by other officials in Vienna. ''We want to have normal relations [with the West]. But if the price to pay is to abandon our rights, we won't pay it."