Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

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The General Accounting Office (GAO) today released a report on the effectiveness of the unilateral sanctions imposed by the United States on Iran. The report cast doubt on the effectiveness of these sanctions and criticized the agencies charged with enforcing the sanctions for failing to make any efforts to assess or to determine the effectiveness of these sanctions.

The broad details of the report are neither surprising or particularly controversial. The report notes that because Iran’s oil-based economy makes it a key player in the global economy, U.S. bans on exports to, and imports from, Iran have been followed by substantial increases in exports from, and imports to, Iran. A timeline graph in the report makes this point eloquently:

The report also notes that transhipment of goods from the U.S. to Iran through third countries also compromises the effectiveness of the sanctions:

According to officials at key U.S. export enforcement agencies, the trade ban may be circumvented by the transshipment of U.S. exports through third countries. Officials identified several locations that serve as common transshipment points for goods destined for Iran. These locations include Germany, Malaysia, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and, according to Commerce officials, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in particular.

Two trends underscore the possibility that U.S. goods are being shipped to Iran through the UAE. First is the considerable growth in U.S. trade flows through the UAE. The United States has become the number one supplier of imports to the UAE and Iran is the UAE’s largest trade partner.

The inclusion of the U.K. and Germany in the list of common transshipment points is a bit surprising, but indicates that exporters can’t ignore the possibility of transshipment based on the country to which the item is being exported.

Finally, the report notes that the Departments of State, Commerce and Treasury, all of which enforce the Iran sanctions, do not engage in any systematic review of the effectiveness of these programs. The Treasury Department, in its response to the GAO findings, took issue with this:

The Treasury Department continues to assess the effectiveness of its authorities that have been used against Iranian entities or Iranian interests. These assessments, which are not publicly available, are designed to determine the specific impact of Treasury actions and their success in meeting policy goals.

Of course if these assessments are, like double secret probation, kept secret, the wisdom of the sanctions is effectively removed from criticism by the U.S. businesses that are negatively impacted by the sanctions.

The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) released today its monthly summary of enforcement actions. It would appear that the OFAC Task Force devoted to crushing sales of Cuban stogies on the Internets was either on vacation or disbanded because this is the first month where some hapless Internaut wasn’t fined a couple of hundred dollars for snagging a few boxes of Cuban Cohibas on-line. Or perhaps the Task Force was assigned to Iranian caviar given the circumstances surrounding the penalty paid by Diversified Business Communications.

Diversified organizes trade shows and conferences, including the annual European Seafood Exposition in Brussels. Sometime after 2000 (the Penalty Notice doesn’t specify a precise date), Diversified sold booth space to Shilat Trading Company, the Iranian company charged with sales and distribution of Iranian caviar.

In it’s defense, Diversified argued to OFAC that on March 17, 2000, the Secretary of State announced that sanctions against Iran would be eased to allow U.S. persons to purchase and import carpets and food products, such as dried fruits, nuts, and caviar from Iran, citing 31 C.F.R. §§ 560.534 and 560.535, which authorize the trade in, among other things, “foodstuffs intended for human consumption.” Diversified also argued that “Shilat is the exclusive producer of Iran’s caviar, which appears to be a primary focus of this exemption.”

OFAC’s response was, in short, that you can’t eat a trade show booth:

Company does not allege to [sic] have purchased foodstuffs from Shilat. Moreover, Company has not denied its provision of services, in the form of booth space booking arrangements, at an annual European seafood exposition, to Shilat, an entity located in Iran.

Because Diversified took steps to keep Shilat from participating in future European Seafood Expositions, OFAC whacked the possible penalty in half, down to $5,500. That’s enough, by the way, to buy about two pounds of Iranian Beluga Caviar at retail.

We reported earlier this week that Iran had announced that it had built a quasi-supercomputer using 213 AMD chips despite U.S. sanctions which would forbid the export of those chips to Iran. Where do you think the chips came from?

Wait, wait, don’t tell me. Let’s first look at a detail of a picture from the Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center (“IHPCRC”) website, showing the computer being built. (This picture has been mysteriously “disappeared” from the IHPCRC site, but was copied first by Softpedia before it vanished).

Let’s zoom in now on one of those boxes behind him.

Well, well, well. That box comes from Thacker FZE, whose website has also mysteriously disappeared, but still appears in the Google cache. Thacker is a distributor of AMD chips. In the UAE. Oh, and look, that would be UAE written right under Thacker’s name.

Who would have thought that the AMD chips came from the UAE?

According to an article in Computerworld:

A spokesman for Thacker … said they have no customers in Iran and noted that products can be imported into that country by many different means, including individual Iranians buying “one or two pieces” of technology in locations such as the UAE and then bringing them across the border.

I’ve been wondering where Baghdad Bob went. Apparently he’s now a spokesman for Thacker in the U.A.E.

According to a piece published yesterday in Information Week, the Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran announced that it had used 218 AMD microprocessors to build a supercomputer with a theoretical peak performance of 860 gigaflops. The fastest supercomputer in the world currently is ranked for 478 teraflops, more than 500 times faster than Amirkabir’s computer.

Of course, the point here isn’t the paltry performance of the Iranian kinda-supercomputer, but rather that such a computer could be built with U.S. components despite the U.S. sanctions on Iran. Obviously U.S. sanctions, despite their purported reach against re-exports, can’t always stanch the flow of mass-produced products to sanctioned countries.

AMD’s response was, not surprisingly, both predictable and believable:

AMD fully complies with all United States export control laws, and all authorized distributors of AMD products have contractually committed to AMD that they will do the same with respect to their sales and shipments of AMD products. Any shipment of AMD products to Iran by any authorized distributor of AMD would be a breach of the specific provisions of their contracts with AMD.

Lesson to be learned here: make sure all your contracts have a clause dealing with illegal exports. That way when you read in the newspaper that your product was found in Iran, you can say the same thing AMD did.