News

If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has his way, Coca-Cola will soon disappear from the streets of Tehran.

Even as President Obama prepared to sign into law Thursday new US sanctions against Iran, the Iranian president has decided that a ban on signature American and Western products is fitting retaliation for the Iran sanctions that the United Nations Security Council approved last month.

Among the targets of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s wrath: IBM, Intel, and Coca-Cola.

The ban on Western products is part of a bifurcated response from Tehran to the recent sanctions targeting the Iranian nuclear program.

On the one hand, Iranian officials blithely dismiss the measures, saying they will have no impact on the country’s nuclear progress – which Iran says is aimed solely at peaceful energy production, but which many global powers have concluded is designed with the development of a nuclear weapon in mind.