US sanctions firms selling arms to Iran and Syria

Bill Gertz:

The Bush administration is imposing economic sanctions on Chinese, Russian and North Korean companies for selling missiles and weapons goods to Iran and Syria, administration officials said.
The sanctions were imposed earlier this week on three Chinese state-run companies, three Russian firms and a North Korean mining company under a 2000 arms proliferation law that was renamed Iran and Syria Nonproliferation Act in 2005.
The sanctions ban U.S. government business and support to the companies for two years and block U.S. firms from selling them items that require export licenses.
They are largely symbolic, but U.S. officials have been effective in publicly singling out companies that are engaged in selling arms to rogue states.
The Bush administration has imposed sanctions more than 40 times since 2001 as part of a more aggressive push to stop arms transfers to rogue states or unstable regions of the world.
The law requires the imposition of sanctions on companies, governments and people caught transferring missiles, weapons of mass destruction materials or advanced conventional arms to Iran or Syria.
The officials said the sanctions were imposed after an interagency review of intelligence on transfers that happened within the past two years.
Specific details of the transfers were not released, but officials said they included missile sales to Syria and arms sales and transfers of weapons-related goods to both Iran and Syria.
The sanctions ban the companies from conducting business with U.S. companies for two years and are likely to affect the Russians more than the Chinese and North Korean companies because of the potential to block sales of aircraft-related materials to U.S. manufacturers.
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Gertz goes on to name the companies involved in the sales. He also speculates that the Norks will take offense as they have on the financial sanctions already imposed. While the sanctions on the surface may not have much impact, they do cause a lot of squealing which suggest there may be more pain involved than is apparent.