Word: iranians
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...Despite all the talk of nonproliferation, fears of the Iranian program might have the opposite effect in the region. Says David Albright, a respected proliferation expert at Washington's Institute for Science in International Security: "As Iran marches down the path to nuclear weapons, either Saudi Arabia will try to buy elements of a nuclear program, or will pursue one with its own nuclear reactors, or will get them through an alliance with Pakistan. Egypt says they might withdraw from Non-Proliferation Treaty. In Syria, there's still a sense that they haven't abandoned their ambition. And even Turkey...
...officials say, the heavy volume of legitimate trade moving from Dubai to Iran - trade between the two countries was worth $12 billion last year, most of it imports into Iran - makes it easier to camouflage illicit items. About 400,000 Iranians live in Dubai, and about 8,000 Iranian companies are registered there, including two major banks, Bank Melli Iran and Bank Saderat Iran, both of which are currently under U.S. sanctions on the allegation that they're funding Iran's nuclear program...
...recent years, Dubai customs officials have uncovered U.S. aircraft parts bound for Iran's military, and last April U.S. officials arrested an Iranian living in California for trying to smuggle U.S. attack helicopters to Iran's military via export companies in Dubai. U.S. officials believe that any sanctions that effectively target Iran's nuclear energy and prevent Iran from importing the equipment needed to overhaul its aging oil infrastructure would have to plug the Dubai loophole. (See the top 10 players in Iran's power struggle...
Iran's deep roots in Dubai's economy pose a further problem for any more expansive sanctions regime. There are Iranian stores, restaurants and companies in almost every building in Dubai, and tens of thousands of Iranians fly regularly to the emirate, many simply to enjoy its free-wheeling lifestyle. "We're talking about tremendous volumes [of exports] in Dubai," says Lisa Prager, former assistant deputy secretary of commerce, who dispatched the first attache to Dubai in 2002 to try to stop military smuggling to Iran; as a Washington attorney, she now represents companies that have been charged with transshipping...
Even without new U.N. measures in place, one area where the U.S. has been successful in imposing its unilateral sanctions is in the financial sector, where it uses the leverage of threatened exclusion from the American financial system to press Dubai's financial services industry into observing U.S. curbs. Iranians in Dubai say they find it increasingly difficult to get credit, even for workaday business dealings. "We have to pay full amounts to the supplier in order to ship the goods to us," says Morteza Masoumzadeh, deputy executive director of the Iranian Business Council in Dubai, whose shipping company focuses...