A small victory for the Obama administration came today when new sanctions cleared the U.N. Security Council. Most analysts believe that the new sanctions will not inhibit Iran's nuclear ambitions. Tehran has called the sanctions "flies" and insisted it would go ahead with uranium enrichment. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the U.N. resolution was "valueless."
But Russia and China, which have strong economic ties with Tehran and have at times resisted sanctions, fully backed the new U.N. move to blacklist dozens of Iranian military, industrial and shipping firms. President Obama said that the sanctions would toughen the weapons embargo and also allow ships to be searched for suspect cargo.
These new sanctions took five long months to procure and quite a bit of political pandering. Brazil and Turkey, angry at the West's dismissal of an atomic fuel deal with Iran that they said made new sanctions unnecessary, voted against. Lebanon, where the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah is in the government, abstained.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva called the resolution a mistake and his foreign minister said he doubted the sanctions would have any impact. But U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Colombia they would "slow down and certainly interfere with" Iran's nuclear ambitions.
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