US sanctions against Iran highlight influence of Israel lobby in Washington: Analyst

The new US sanctions against Iran’s petrochemical industry will expedite America’s economic and political decline and highlights the influence of the Israel lobby in US foreign policy, says an American writer and former professor.

The US Treasury Department said in a statement on Friday that the latest sanctions are aimed at choking off financing for Iran’s largest and most profitable petrochemical group, called Persian Gulf Petrochemical Industries Company (PGPIC).

The Treasury Department also imposed sanctions on PGPIC’s network of 39 subsidiary petrochemical companies and what it called "foreign-based sales agents.” It warned that international companies continuing to partner with PGPIC or its subsidiaries and sales agents "will themselves be exposed to US sanctions."

"This action is a warning that we will continue to target holding groups and companies in the petrochemical sector and elsewhere that provide financial lifelines to the IRGC," US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in the statement.

The Treasury accused PGPIC of providing financial support for the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC).

“The entire office of sanctions at the Treasury Department is run by Jews and this is the classic instance of where American foreign policy is in the hand of Jews,” said E Michael Jones, the current editor of Culture Wars magazine.

“This has created a completely distorted view of the United States in the rest of the world; it is also causing chaos throughout the world by disrupting the world’s monetary system and it’s also going to cause the end of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency,” Jones told Press TV on Monday.

“The more people the United States puts under sanctions, the more they are putting nails in the coffin of the American empire, because they’re forcing people throughout the world to come to some type of alternative to the SWIFT payments that is basically the operating system of the world economy,” he added.

PressTV-US hits Iran’s petrochemical industry with sanctions

The Trump administration has announced new sanctions on Iran, targeting the country’s petrochemical industry, including its largest petrochemical holding group, PGPIC.

The new sanctions come as the administration of US President Donald Trump seeks to increase economic and military pressure against Iran following Washington’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, which was reached between Tehran and six world powers in 2015.

However, US analysts and former Treasury official have called the sanctions against Iran’s petrochemical holding group as largely symbolic that will likely have only a modest effect.

Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution think tank described the latest US sanctions as “a natural next step in what I think is a deliberately redundant array of restrictions.”

A former Treasury official, who asked not to be named, described them as “a public relations” move. “It’s a good way of keeping the political pressure on the front page,” he said.

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