7-28-08, 3:49 am

A measure that would impose a naval blockade on Iran stalled in Congress this week after grassroots opponents of a new war with Iran spoke out against it.

House Resolution 362, authored by Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY), would have mandated a prohibition on 'the export to Iran of all refined petroleum products; imposing stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran.'

These sanctions establishing a naval blockade sounded to many people like the first step towards war with Iran.

The bill also emphasized Iran's past efforts at gaining nuclear technology and implied that such technology would be used to make nuclear weapons. The evidence for such a conclusion is weak at best and counters a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that noted that the best evidence indicates Iran closed down its nuclear operations in 2003.

Additionally, the bill accused Iran of funding militias in Iraq and Afghanistan that are attacking US allies or interests, ignoring recent revelations about US military provocations in Iran.

Introduced in late June, the bill garnered over 200 co-sponsors quickly. But grassroots and online organizations also responded speedily. Groups like J Street, MoveOn.org, and United for Peace and Justice sent out e-mail alerts to their members and tens of thousands of emails and telephone calls poured into congressional offices.

Some members of Congress subsequently apologized for not reading the bill more carefully, and within the past two weeks, key congressional Democrats backed away from supporting the bill.

One such member of Congress was House Committee on Foreign Affairs Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), who has insisted on amending the bill to extract the blockade language before passage in his committee.

The peace group J Street, which describes itself as 'the political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement,' circulated a second e-mail this past week to supporters urging renewed opposition to the bill.

In a column last week at Huffington Post, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), another co-sponsor of the measure, urged amending it. Wexler argued that the language that called for a naval blockade be removed, and provisions calling for direct American involvement in the negotiations with Iran, with the goal of stopping Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons and its sponsorship of terror, be inserted.

Suggesting that the author of the bill did not intend for the bill's sanctions to lead to a war, Wexler further stated, 'I fully understand and share the American public's mistrust of President Bush and his administration, which has abused its executive powers, willfully misled this nation into a disastrous war in Iraq and disturbingly continues to beat the Iran war drum.'

The J Street e-mail alert stated: 'Let's be clear: we recognize the threat Iran poses to regional stability, to US interests, and to Israel. But Resolution 362 in its current form undermines diplomatic efforts to address that threat. What better way to convince Iranian hardliners to pursue a nuclear weapon than to provoke them with a blockade?'

But this rhetoric may need to be scaled back, too, suggests Jamshid Ahmadi, assistant general secretary of the Committee for the Defense of the Iranian People's Rights, an organization both sharply critical of the Iranian regime and the Bush administration's Middle East policy.

In a recent op-ed posted at the organization's web site, Ahmadi wrote, 'An increase in tension could serve the Republican presidential campaign based on the assessment that the ruling party is better placed to deal with a crisis.'

Ahmadi felt that heightening the tension and sense of crisis with Iran, which the Ackerman resolution, by any account, would certainly have caused, might itself provoke an attack ordered by the Bush administration just to force the next administration into a military engagement it might otherwise have sought to avoid.

'[T]he hawks [in the administration] could argue that action now could tie an incoming Democratic president to a course of action they would be unable to influence,' Ahmadi wrote.

--Joel Wendland can be reached at