State Department Insists UN Sanctions Will Be Reimposed on Iran

Sept. 17, 2020 (EIRNS)—Convicted Iran-Contra liar Elliott Abrams—who was pardoned by another Iran-Contra criminal, George H.W. Bush—swaggered into the State Department press briefing room yesterday to, in effect, issue orders to the rest of the world regarding sanctions on Iran. “As you know, virtually all UN sanctions on Iran will come back into place this weekend at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Saturday the 19th,” said Abrams, the Special Representative for Venezuela and now, almost incredibly, also for Iran.

“The arms embargo will now be reimposed indefinitely and other restrictions will return, including the ban on Iran engaging in enrichment and reprocessing-related activities, the prohibition on ballistic missile testing and development, and sanctions on the transfer of nuclear and missile-related technologies to Iran.”

He observed that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had preceded him in the same briefing just a couple of hours earlier where he told reporters that “we expect all UN member states to implement the UN sanctions fully and respect the process and obligations to uphold these sanctions.”

The fact that all but two members of the UN General Assembly agree that the U.S. has no legal standing to invoke the reimposition of UN sanctions on Iran under UN Security Council resolution 2231, is of little consequence to Abrams and Pompeo. “I think that all of those individual actors around the world will take a look at the text of those sanctions and what the United States is saying and will realize that for them, the UN sanctions must be regarded as back into effect,” he said. Abrams promised a series of announcements coming over the next several days on how the U.S. is planning to make all of that happen.

Earlier, Pompeo had declared that “We will return to the United Nations to reimpose sanctions so that the arms embargo will become permanent next week.” Despite the isolation of the U.S. on the question of sanctions on Iran, Pompeo insisted that “These will be valid UN Security Council resolutions and the United States will do what it always does, it will do its share as part of the—its responsibilities to enable peace, this time in the Middle East.” He vowed that “We’ll do all the things we need to do to ensure that those sanctions are enforced.” Standing next to Pompeo was British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab who, aside from a few “shades of difference” on the 2015 nuclear agreement, fully agreed with Pompeo.