Editorial: Deaf ears for whining Iran

Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2006 | 7:27 a.m.

Oh, the injustice! The United States has cracked down on Iran's largest bank and now the country is crying foul to the International Monetary Fund.

"This is going against international banking and trade," Ebrahim Sheibany, Iran's central bank governor, said this week on Iranian state television.

And the IMF is supposed to be sympathetic? The members of IMF - an organization of 184 nations, including Iran, whose purpose is to promote just and efficient cooperation on worldwide financial transactions - know just as the U.S. knows that Iran, through its state-owned banks, is funneling money around the world to terrorist organizations.

In 1996 President Bill Clinton signed the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act in an effort to curb the two nations' terrorist activities and, in Iran's case, its ambition to become a nuclear power. The broad-based sanctions included a ban on U.S. banks dealing directly with Iran's banks. Some indirect transactions, however, involving third-party banks, were permitted under the sanctions.

Earlier this month the Treasury Department blocked Iran's largest bank, Bank Saderat Iran (meaning the Export Bank of Iran) from doing any business with the U.S., even if a third-party bank is involved. The action was taken because the 1996 act has proved to be not strict enough to stop Iran's suspected nuclear-weapons program and its policy of providing terror groups with arms and financial aid.

"The accusation is baseless and illegal," Sheibany says.

Anyone who would believe that statement is not living in the real world. Iran blatantly supports the Palestinian group Islamic Resistance Movement, better known by its Arabic acronym Hamas. It also supports Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Both groups attract followers through broad social programs and political influence, but have at their core a fanatical dedication to destroying Israel through terrorism.

Iran also supports other terrorism groups in the Middle East, and is widely known to be supporting and inciting much of the violence in Iraq that is killing U.S. troops and Iraqi citizens. And it is continuing to aggressively attain status as a nuclear power.

Full economic sanctions are the least that Iran should expect from the U.S. and the rest of the civilized world.