Neo-cons drive Iran divestment campaign

[donsu]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IE12Ak04.html


- Neo-conservative hawks who championed the invasion of Iraq are leading a new campaign to persuade state and local governments, as well as other institutional investors, to "divest" their holdings in foreign companies and US overseas subsidiaries doing business in Iran.

While stressing that US military action against Iran's nuclear program should not be taken off the table, they call their divestment strategy the "non-violent tool for countering the Iranian threat".

And, like the run-up to the Iraq war, the campaign has attracted bipartisan support. Democrats, including those who strongly oppose the George W Bush administration's Iraq policy, see divestment, as well as other proposed economic sanctions against Tehran, as a way to look "tough on Iran" short of going to war.

"I'm not yet ready to suggest the use of military force ... but one has to stay on alert that that time could come sooner rather than later," James Woolsey, who served briefly as president Bill Clinton's Central Intelligence Agency director, told an Ohio legislative committee this week in support of a bill that would ban investments by that state's pension funds in companies operating in Iran or in any other country the State Department lists as a state sponsor of terrorism.

-snip-

The new campaign, the brainchild of the far-right Center for Security Policy (CSP), is designed to put pressure on the Islamic Republic to abandon its nuclear program, end its support of anti-Israel groups such as the Palestinian Hamas and Lebanon's Hezbollah, and "perhaps even to push toward collapse", according to FDD president Clifford May, by depriving Iran of foreign investment and commercial ties with other countries.
-long snip-
-------------------------


state pension funds

[WCGreen]

1. All this would do is allienate the people whoare, believe it or not,

sympathetic to the American way of life...

Oh well, one more way to create enemies...