A friend wanted to know what I thought of the incident in the Gulf, where 15 British sailors were captured by Iranian forces.
I should begin by saying that being a blogger doesn’t and shouldn’t make me an expert on foreign affairs!
It’s interesting to note that something very similar happened in 2004, and also that several senior Iranian officers have recently been captured in Iraq, leading to Iranian threats to ‘retaliate’. So in one sense, it’s hardly a sensational development. Iranian forces are well used to the strategy of using hostages to gain leverage.
(I’ll assume at this point that the British sailors were in fact in Iraqi waters, and so ‘in the right’).
The fact that the media love a ‘hostage crisis’, with its extended denoument, plays into Iranian hands- the ability of the media to run images and simulateously ‘deplore’ them is very useful to Iran. TV pictures of uneasy hostages tap a rich vein of public anxiety.
The US and UK are in a terribly awkward position- they’ve painted themselves into a moral corner by labelling Iran as a ‘rogue state’, not to be bargained with, never mind conceded to. On the other hand, Iran is a much tougher nut than Iraq, from a military point of view.
The real diplomacy seems to be happening within the European and UN dimensions, behind closed doors (where real diplomacy should be). I’m hoping there’ll be a deal bashed out there, which the US and UK will try to dress up as something minor, while the Iranians celebrate it as a great coup.
Good comment here from Channel 4’s Jonathan Rugman.
The whole incidents highlights the fact that securing Iraq is not the same thing as invading it, but that could be another post…
things that might have been otherwise 