It’s a slow day today in export news, so we’re bringing you a grab bag of various items, each interesting but none worthy of an entire post:

• Vanderbilt University has announced that it has hired a new assistant director of export compliance to handle the “new wave of federal export control regulations that is crashing down on Vanderbilt.” Were we asleep and missed a new wave of export control regulations or did Vanderbilt just wake up and discover the export regulations that crashed down on Vanderbilt years ago?
• An article on the Deutsche Welle website indicates that German firms are circumventing sanctions on Iran by doing business in Iran with suitcases of cash to avoid detection. This leads to the day’s most amusing quote from a German businessman living in Tehran:
  

  “If a plane crashes on its way to Tehran from Germany, then the loss of the luggage would be more expensive than the loss of the plane,” he said.

• A spokesman for the State Department testified yesterday in a Senate hearing that in response to the sham electoral victory of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, the United States is considering additional sanctions against individuals and government entities in Zimbabwe. Raise your hands if you think these will lead Mugabe to break down in tears, resign his office, and flee the country.

ABOVE: Coke and Fanta in Iran

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A fascinating Associated Press article published today reports the results of an FOIA request the wire service made for information relating to U.S. exports to Iran. According to the information obtained by the AP, U.S. exports have grown more than ten-fold during the last seven years of the Bush administration, notwithstanding U.S. concerns about nuclear proliferation activities by Iran. The largest export: cigarettes. Almost $158 million dollars worth of cigarettes. That’s a lot of lung cancer and heart disease. (Full disclosure: as a former smoker, I tend to be a rabidly anti-smoking.)

Most surprisingly, the figures given to the AP reveal military exports to Iran, including $106,635 in military rifles and $8,760 in rifle parts and other accessories. Adam Szubin, speaking for the Office of Foreign Assets Control, argued that it was unlikely that these exports actually occurred and cited the possibility that shipping documents listed these codes erroneously or that shippers may have confused Iran and Iraq when filling out these documents. Some support for this can be found in government data saying that the U.S. exported $13,000 in “aircraft launching gear and/or deck arrestors” to Iran. As far as anyone knows Iran doesn’t have any aircraft carriers Still, even if these were mistakes by the shippers, one has to wonder why someone at Customs didn’t catch these mistakes.