When you’ve shouted Rule Britannia, when you’ve sung God Save the Queen, when
you’ve finished murdering mullahs with your mouth . . . Then what do you do?
So Kipling might have asked of the gathering storm over Iran.
If I were one of 15 British military hostages, about whose fate Britons are
naturally concerned this weekend, I would have been less than happy by the
answer that drove British ministers into their hawk/dove act at the United
Nations last week. A foreign secretary who cannot pay a farm subsidy on time
and a departing prime minister desperate for no rain on his parade did not
make a convincing pair.
Tony Blair’s foreign policy has replaced Labour bleeding-heart syndrome with
tabloid bleeding-head syndrome. Any storm of angst must be appeased by
endless “expressions of outrage” followed by “doing something”, preferably
warlike. Under such pressure ministers flew as hawks to the UN dovecote and
came away with mouths full of feathers.
The capture of the 15 troops is a repeat of a similar exploit when eight
British marines and sailors were held on the Shatt al-Arab in 2004 and of
numerous tit-for-tat arrests, kidnaps, ransoms and random killings in the
course of the Iraq war, in which Iran has been complicit from the start. The
capture, forecast by the Revolutionary Guards’ one-time clerical patron,
Ayatollah Khamenei, was a deliberate act of provocation. It was probably a
response to the American arrest of five Revolutionary Guards still being
held incommunicado in Iraq and to the recent UN vote against the Guards’ pet
project, Iran’s nuclear programme.
This 120,000-strong nationalist wing of Iranian politics, the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard Council (IRGC), is determined to sabotage any move to
comply with UN nuclear inspection and any rapprochement with the West, for
instance over Iraq. They have just suffered the defection of their second in
command, Brigadier Ali Reza Asgari. What is strange is that the Royal Navy
should have risked sending marines so unprotected to within striking
distance of the Guards’ piratical naval units at the very moment when
tension was at this height.
Iranian diplomacy is devious, divided, emotional but never without purpose.
This is why handling Iran with the traditional mix of sticks and carrots is
so phenomenally hard. Britain’s visit to the UN last week appears to have
been an error. The security council had just passed, with great difficulty,
a full sanctions resolution against Iran for failing to cooperate with UN
nuclear inspection. Supported by Russia and China it clearly hit Iranian
confidence, but for Britain immediately to go back to New York against Iran
invited a rebuff. The government got more effective backing on Friday from
Europe, a rare occurrence, and useful from a group that has serious
sanctions it might impose on Iran.
Britain cannot play this crisis two ways. It cannot maintain that the naval
incident was unrelated to the Iraq war or nuclear proliferation and was
essentially a matter of maps, and then demand a stiff reaction from the UN
security council inside a week. The captives were never going to be released
by the IRGC at once, since they are plainly pawns in the febrile politics of
Tehran. When the chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, fumed over
Britain’s recourse to the UN, it appeared sincere, the anger of a man
desperate to keep the IRGC hotheads in check. The captives’ use as
propaganda on television may seem to Blair an obscene throwback to Saddamist
diplomacy, but America and Britain can hardly lecture others on judicial
proprieties given their record of law and order in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.
Iran at present is both strong and weak. A vast country of 70m people, it is
blessed with immense potential wealth, a majestic history, a still vital
culture and bursting national pride. Yet it exports arms and instability to
the Middle East and Iraq and elements within it have no compunction about
behaving as lawless bandits. Its isolation, both invited and imposed by
America, renders it unpredictable and unreliable.
In an ideal world, Iran is like Egypt or Turkey, Muslim states that the West
should “hug close” in a region devoid of such stabilisers. But Iraq has made
this part of the world diplomatically toxic. It is an oil and drug-fuelled
zone of anarchy. The laptop neocons who launched the West on unfinished wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq — and who are now blaming others for their errors —
are returning to default mode and seem set on a third war, against Iran.
Such a war is for idiots. The idea that the toppling of the present Iranian
government by the West, of all people, would further regional stability is
plain daft.
Yet even in the neocon ranks Francis Fukuyama, Richard Perle and Kenneth
Adelman have admitted, in Adelman’s words, that the Iraq fiasco has killed
“the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using
our power for moral good in the world”. But that merely restates Kipling’s
question. So what? Is the best America can do to park two carriers in the
Gulf?
Iran’s hardliners can face down the West’s military might — and clearly know
it. But they cannot bluff the West’s economic potency, nor rely on normal
partners such as Russia and China or even Turkey. Economic sanctions
normally do not work. They are deployed against dictatorships that have no
care for the poverty they impose on their people. They are a cruel tax
imposed by rich countries on poor countries to help them feel good. So far
that has appeared true even of sanctions against Iran.
Yet Iran is not a dictatorship but a layered oligarchy sitting atop
rudimentarily democratic institutions. Its rulers must keep an eye on the
mob and the ballot box. The elected president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is in
serious trouble. His support in the Majlis assembly has dwindled and he has
been publicly rebuked for his nuclear diplomacy by his supreme leader,
Khamenei. He is no longer popular, witness recent local election results and
the suppression of university dissent, echo of the undoing of the Shah’s
regime.
In other words economic sanctions may have traction, however briefly. The
populist leader who promised to “put oil wealth on the tables of the poor”
has done the opposite. For lack of refining capacity Ahmadinejad finds he
has to import 40% of his petrol at world prices and then subsidise 80% of
that price at home. Next month, the economics ministry is introducing petrol
rationing and increasing petrol prices by 20%, and this is at a time of
soaring inflation, unemployment and rent. This could be explosive.
When Iran plays dirty in exporting terrorist weapons and defying nuclear
inspection, those responsible are susceptible to nonmilitary sanction in a
way that embattled dictatorships are not. Tehran needs Russia, China and
European export guarantees, especially those from Germany and France. It
desperately needs petrol imports. The IRGC may not care directly about these
things, but as long as it too requires clerical sponsors, and those sponsors
depend in some degree on electoral support, it is vulnerable.
There is every likelihood of a nuclear Iran, which the West has neither the
military capacity nor the moral authority to prevent. Whether nuclear power
becomes a nuclear weapon depends to an extent on how far the West (and
Russia and China) succeed in hugging close those elements in Iran that have
no interest in perpetuating its pariah status. As with Pakistan and India
what the world cannot prevent it can at least struggle to contain.
Somehow sane Iranians have to extricate the British captives from the grip of
the IRGC. To this end British policy might use less megaphone diplomacy and
more of the pressure that is now torturing the Iranian economy in ways that
are weakening the regime and strengthening the hands of the antiAhmadinejad
reformers. Squeezing foreign assets and denying petrol supplies is part of
that pressure. But such sticks need to be instant, fierce and set aside when
successful.
Bringing Iran back within some sort of comity of nations ranks as top priority
in a part of the world that holds the promise of infinite torment for the
West. It will demand the toughest love in the history of diplomacy.
simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk
