new unilateral American sanctions on Iran that impose penalties on foreign entities that sell refined petroleum to Iran or assist Iran with its domestic refining capacity. The new law also requires that American and foreign businesses that seek contracts with the U.S. government certify that they do not engage in prohibited business with Iran. Foreign banks that deal with the Revolutionary Guard or other blacklisted Iranian institutions like Iranian banks involved in terrorism would be restricted or banned entirely from the American financial system. …

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A New York Times analysis in March found that the federal government had awarded more than $107 billion in contract payments, grants and other benefits over the past decade to foreign and multinational American companies while they were doing business in Iran. That included $15 billion paid to companies that defied American sanctions by making large investments that helped Iran develop its vast oil and gas reserves.

Money may be the weakest point for Iran’s nuclear ayatollahs. America’s Congress has just voted to force banks, insurers, energy firms and others to choose: trade with Iran and you will be barred from business with the United States. …

Even before the vote in Congress on June 24th, reputation-conscious banks accounting firms, insurers (crucial for freight) and others had been pulling out of Iran or scaling down their business. Now France’s Total has joined BP, India’s Reliance, Malaysia’s Petronas, Russia’s Lukoil and others in stopping gasoline sales to Iran (which imports 30-40% of its petrol). Spain’s Repsol is just the latest energy firm to junk contracts in Iran’s gas or oil fields. …

Some fear that Chinese and other firms will snap up the lost business. But America’s new legislation (if full use is made of it) would hit them too. Moreover, dwindling trade and the legal cover of UN sanctions have helped persuade even once-reluctant governments in Europe and Asia to stiffen their own trade restrictions. …

Iran has friends, not least fellow nuclear rule-breakers North Korea, Syria and Myanmar. Its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, hobnobs with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. But there is little profit for Iran’s merchants in such places.

wise to slam the door on the Iranian regime’s access to energy expertise. It’s now up to President Obama and European leaders to make sure that it stays shut.

Will sanctions, applied seriously, cause the regime to change its behavior -- or cause Iranians to change the regime? No one knows. What we can say with certainty: This is the last peaceful means to that end, the only way left, short of military force, to do something about Iranian despots who are sorely oppressing their population at home, sponsoring terrorists abroad, facilitating the killing of Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, building nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them, threatening Israel with genocide, allying with America's enemies in Latin America, and vowing that a "world without America . . . is attainable." This is, without question, the most serious national-security threat of the 21st century. Passivity and appeasement should not be an option.

The goal of sanctions against Iran is to make the cost of continuing its nuclear program higher than the benefits. Shutting down the financial sources the regime uses to support its nuclear program is the most effective way to change its behavior. …

Harmonized transatlantic sanctions led by the U.S. and EU with the support of their allies offers the last, best chance of avoiding two unpalatable alternatives: Bombing Iran's nuclear infrastructure, or conceding that Iran will become a nuclear weapons state.

"We don't believe that Iran’s designs for the region are in Syria’s best interest," Crowley told reporters.

[T]he Lebanese newspaper al-Akhbar has inadvertently exposed Palestinian businessman Yasser Kashlak, financier of the new flotilla to Gaza, as a Hezbollah supporter. The flotilla's other organizer, Samar al-Haj, is married to a Lebanese Internal Security Agency officer who was jailed for the 2005 murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, an assassination that UN investigators have reportedly found was carried out by Hezbollah.

Does this portend still more clashes between Islamists and Israeli commandos on the high seas? Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah certainly made sure to "salute" the members of the May 31 flotilla from Turkey for their courage after they incited a needless battle that led to nine deaths.

Yet, while Hezbollah leaves bloody fingerprints all over the globe, some Washington insiders are calling for America to reach out to the terrorist group. … Hezbollah is an avowed enemy of the United States and its allies. It refuses to disarm. To the contrary, with Iranian and Syrian assistance, it continues to amass a deadly arsenal.

The terrorists who plotted to blow up New York City subways last year may have met with a top al Qaeda operative who has been wanted by the US since 2003 …

the anti-Taliban Pashtun community is still vastly larger in numbers than those who want to see a return of Mullah Omar and his kind. …

Afghan patriotism -- even after its religious radicalization in the 1970s and the awful, sanguinary years since -- isn’t particularly xenophobic, except among those Pashtuns who’ve drunk deeply of the radical Islamism that the Arab jihadists carried with them during the Soviet-Afghan war (1979–1989) and that Pakistani madrassas incubated so effectively.

Foreigners who like to depict the Taliban as an increasingly popular liberation movement seriously miscast the dynamics at work. ...

Some folks want to hope that the new Taliban won’t have the pro–Al Qaeda philosophy of the old Taliban, that they will have learned their lesson that the global jihad brings foreign invasion and Predator drones. But the opposite seems vastly more likely: The Taliban will have driven the United States out of Afghanistan. Victory against the Soviets will have been followed by victory against the Americans. Mullah Omar’s decision to sacrifice his regime on the altar of global jihad will have in the end brought ultimate victory. Bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri will come out of the mountains ...

Without American boots on the ground in Afghanistan and (covertly) in Pakistan, operations against Al Qaeda and its allied subcontinent brothers will effectively cease. There is no such thing as an “over-the-horizon” intelligence and counterterrorist operation.

What distinguishes President Obama’s hopes for Afghanistan from President Bush’s much-despised aspirations for Iraq? At his press conference following the G-20 summit, President Obama sounded like a neoconservative:

I reject the notion that the Afghan people don’t want some of the basic things that everybody wants -- basic rule of law, a voice in governance, economic opportunity, basic physical security, electricity, roads, an ability to get a harvest to market and get a fair price for it without having to pay too many bribes in between. And I think we can make a difference, and the coalition can make a difference, in them meeting those aspirations

Needless to say, the war in Afghanistan was not "a war of Obama’s choosing." It has been prosecuted by the United States under Presidents Bush and Obama. …

At a time when Gen. Petraeus has just taken over command, when Republicans in Congress are pushing for a clean war funding resolution, when Republicans around the country are doing their best to rally their fellow citizens behind the mission, your comment is more than an embarrassment. It’s an affront, both to the honor of the Republican party and to the commitment of the soldiers fighting to accomplish the mission they’ve been asked to take on by our elected leaders.

There are, of course, those who think we should pull out of Afghanistan, and they’re certainly entitled to make their case. But one of them shouldn't be the chairman of the Republican party.

President Obama’s National Security Strategy insists on calling the enemy -- how else do you define those seeking your destruction? -- “a loose network of violent extremists.” But this is utterly meaningless. This is not an anger-management therapy group gone rogue. These are people professing a powerful ideology rooted in a radical interpretation of Islam, in whose name they propagandize, proselytize, terrorize, and kill.

Why is this important? Because the first rule of war is to know your enemy. If you don’t, you wander into intellectual cul-de-sacs and ignore the real causes that might allow you to prevent recurrences. …

Islamist fundamentalism is … the common denominator linking all the great terror attacks of this century -- from 9/11 to Mumbai, from Fort Hood to Times Square, from London to Madrid to Bali. The attackers were of various national origin, occupation, age, social class, native tongue, and race. The one thing that united them was the jihadist vision in whose name they acted.

counterterrorism requires a comprehensive strategy, including greater liberties for repressed populations. The lack of freedom in the Arab world -- including Saudi Arabia -- remains a significant driver of radicalization. No reform; no durable de-radicalization. …

[T]he Jihadist narrative places Muslims as victims and the West (or specifically America/Israel) as the aggressor. In the 1990s, for example, the United Nations-approved sanctions against Saddam Hussein's Iraq was the Jihadists' cause du jour …

Our enemies need no extra fodder for recruitment and motivation. Their propaganda is no doubt bolstered by having real wars in Muslim lands to cite, but they've proven how little they actually need. Embassies were burned and people murdered over cartoons. …