The seizure by Iran of 15 Royal Navy sailors and Marines on Friday has elicited a cool-headed diplomatic response. Downing Street and the Foreign Office have emphasised the need for consular access to our servicemen while seeking to calm a tense stand-off. The Foreign Secretary made it “very clear” there had been no incursion into Iranian waters and demanded a “full explanation” for Iran’s actions. The UK Ambassador to Tehran reinforced the message. Only yesterday did the Prime Minister increase the pressure by describing Iran’s action as “unjustified and wrong” and insisting that “the quicker [the situation] is resolved, the easier it will be for all of us”.

God help us. From the moment British servicemen were abducted, the danger was that the Government would underreact. So it has. You can understand an overriding concern with getting its people back unharmed.

But purely from that pragmatic standpoint, never mind wider principles, the wrong message has been given. Even if the sailors are released quickly, a damaging precedent will have been transmogrified into a pattern.

The Iranians mounted a similar attack in 2004, when six Royal Marines and two sailors were abducted from the Shatt al-Arab waterway. The servicemen were spirited to Tehran and paraded blindfold on television, which broadcast their apprehensive apologies for a “big mistake”. If those servicemen did indeed make a mistake by inadvertently straying into Iranian waters, the treatment they received remained unconscionable.

Expert View

When US forces arrested five Iranian men this year, they may have set in motion a chain of events that led to the abduction of 15 British servicemen

Richard Beeston

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BACKGROUND

• Family of woman seized by Iran tell of distress

• Britain’s Hostage Crisis

• Iran rebuffs Blair’s plea for release of captives

• Keep up the pressure

Related Internet Links

• What is Iran up to? And will it end in military conflict?

• Comment Central: Why the Iranians wanted Faye Turney to "confess"

• Comment Central: Everything you've always wanted to know about Iran

Iran’s repeat kidnapping of British servicemen is piracy. The men (and one woman) seized are part of a force operating under a UN Security Council resolution. That force has authority under international law to board vessels in Iraqi waters. Its work in protecting Iraqi oil platforms is essential to the welfare of an emerging constitutional state.

That background explains much about Iranian foreign policy. How we and our allies deal with a recalcitrant, untrustworthy and erratic state has important repercussions for the security of the region. Intelligence reports strongly suggest that Iran is smuggling improvised explosive devices across the border with Iraq for use by Shia militias.

President Ahmadinejad has introduced into international discourse a distinctively modern strain of anti-Semitism through gleeful anticipation of the extinction of Israel and sponsorship of Holocaust denial. Most disturbing and flagrant is Iran’s serial nuclear deceptions to the International Atomic Energy Agency and the UN.

On Saturday the UN Security Council imposed military and financial sanctions on Iran for refusing to suspend its nuclear programme. The disapproval was hardly sweeping, nor were the measures draconian, yet Iran has announced withdrawal even from its current veneer of cooperation with the IAEA. A spokesman for the US National Security Council, expressing the brutish unilateralism for which the Bush Administration is famed, declared: “Considering the international community is united in its desire to work with Iran on a solution, their comments are disappointing.”

There we go again. Like Charlie Brown expecting Lucy not to pull the football away this time, the Western democracies assume Iran will join the community of nations if only we are sufficiently accommodating. But accommodation is already extensive. It includes accepting Iran’s right to develop peaceful nuclear technology without necessarily pressing for a cessation of work on the nuclear fuel cycle. The US has also accepted a compromise proposal from Russia for some uranium enrichment activity to be moved from Iran to Russia. Yet Iran’s response is obdurate, and its behaviour patently aggressive. Fifteen British sailors and Marines are only the latest victims of this provocative and threatening regime.

Their welfare and that of Iran’s neighbours require something more than declarations of disapproval. The question is what.

It is unlikely that the US or Israel is seriously, or at least imminently, contemplating military action against Iran. The logistical difficulties, risk of failure and potential diplomatic costs would be huge. The colossal failures of the occupation of Iraq aside, the growth of civil society in Iran and its chafing at theocratic oppression are assets that Western diplomacy can use, as were not available under the singular barbarism of Saddam Hussein.

A grand rapprochement with the mullahs is probably out of reach. Given Iran’s flagrant deceptions, that may be just as well. Our message should instead be one of diplomatic and economic pressure, on the premise urged in 1947 by the architect of containment, George Kennan: the regime “can easily withdraw — and usually does — when strong resistance is encountered at any point. Thus, if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do so.”

Kennan was of course writing of the Soviet Union under Stalin. His policy has wider and current applicability. Pressure works. Iran did twice agree to freeze its nuclear programme till it saw a diplomatic opportunity to restart it. European powers who urge multilateral diplomacy must stand by the integrity of the writ of the UN Security Council, and Resolution 1737 requiring Iran to suspend its work on uranium enrichment. They must impose and police sanctions on dual-use technology to hamper and disrupt Iran’s ambitions.

In particular, we must insist that the provocative stance of an insular and aggrandising theocracy will not be entertained or taken seriously. Our servicemen must be released. The way we press for that may ultimately assist the release of Iran’s people too.

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