The Owen Matthews at the Daily Mail:
We are a soft target, and Iran knows it. That is exactly why its unstable president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad chose to target British sailors for his latest attempt to blackmail the international community.
Well naturally, their strategy is to pick on the weak and defenseless.
He knows full well that Britain is in no position to retaliate, either militarily or diplomatically.
The current Iranian leadership’s view of international politics might be delusional and often wrong – but it’s clear enough even to them that Tony Blair is in office but not in power, his political position at home and abroad fatally weakened by the debacle of Iraq.
That should not be the case; Iraq shouldn’t be referred to as a ‘debacle’.
Now Blair faces the awful prospect of being held to ransom by Iran’s rulers.
Why should this be different than any other time in history when Islamofascists have held hostages? It is what they do, and if we’d have a stone of sense, we’d have prepared ourselves.
Ahmadinejad no doubt hopes that the eight sailors and seven Royal Marines can be used as some sort of bargaining chip. Yet his likely demands are impossible for Blair to meet without risking deep humiliation.
Undoubtedly.
One demand could be to insist the UK backs away from an escalating programme of United Nations sanctions over Tehran’s nuclear programme. Another might be for Iranian-backed militias to be be given a free hand as they prepare to take over Basra after a British withdrawal.
This is what it REALLY is about; the sanctions.
Both demands are unthinkable for Number 10. So what can be done? U.S. President Jimmy Carter faced a similar dilemma when revolutionary students seized the American Embassy in Tehran in November 1979, holding 54 American diplomats prisoner for 444 days.
Carter’s response was an embarrassment in front of the world; even today he demonizes Israel and supports the terrorists.
The U.S. refused the kidnappers’ main demand to return the toppled Shah of Iran to his homeland to face trial – but the hostages were eventually ransomed for covert shipments of American arms.
What he said.
The disgrace of the Iranian hostages cost Carter the presidency. Blair now faces a similarly high stakes game.
I’m not certain that is a fair comparison. Blair took a stand on Iraq after 9/11, and stood with Bush as an ally; a courageous position that Carter would never have found himself taking.
Ahmadinejad himself is no stranger to kidnapping for political ends. As a student in Tehran at the time of the 1979 Islamic revolution, he was a member of an ultra-conservative group known as the Office for Strengthening Unity, which planned the storming of the American Embassy.
And there is an infamous picture of him holding a hostage, which he disputes is him, but we all know was him. That hostage was held for 444 days, and recently spoke out about his fear for the Brits.
Twenty-five years later, his revolutionary generation are now in power. Even by the standards of Iran’s ruling mullahs, he is a religious zealot. He has described himself as ‘the restorer of religion and justice’ and dismissed the Nazi holocaust as a ‘myth’.
Something that he and Carter agree upon, apparently.
But while his inflammatory pronouncements might seem petulant and even downright bonkers, there’s method in the madness.
There always is….
He has three very good reasons to continue stoking international tensions. The first is that every belligerent word from President Bush, every escalation – including the kidnapping of the British sailors – sends nervous tremors through the world’s oil markets and pushes up the price of crude.
Iran, as one of the world’s major oil exporters, has benefited greatly from sky-high prices. And Ahmadinejad badly needs the money to keep the Iranian people happy with massive spending. Oil prices, which had been steadily sagging over the winter, jumped to their highest since December as soon as the news of the Iranian seizure of the sailors broke.
The second reason why Ahmadinejad needs to pick a fight with Britain is to boost his flagging popularity. His government might be swimming in oil money, but he has done little to deliver on election promises to bring down unemployment and revitalise crumbling industries.
In December, voters dealt his supporters a crushing blow in local elections. The only way he can stay in power is to play up the threat of foreign enemies and cast himself as the champion of his country’s interests against a hostile world.
But his biggest patriotic stunt, of course, has been his insistence on Iran’s right to a nuclear programme.
Political stunt, yes. Patriotic? That’s an interesting choice of words.
While his own popularity might be flagging, polls show that 94 per cent of Iranians support their country’s right to have atomic power. Yet his radical stance on nukes – including barring inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency and boasting of uranium enrichment programmes – is starting to backfire.
Twice – in December and this week – the United Nations Security Council has voted unanimously to condemn Tehran’s nuclear programme, and has imposed steadily tightening economic sanctions which threaten to paralyse Iran’s banking and industry. Even Russia, which last year sold more than £500million of arms to Tehran and is building Iran’s first nuclear reactor at Bushehr, backed the UN resolution.
Iran is fast running out of friends.
In the face of united international opposition, Ahmadinejad has few cards left to play.
I would say no cards left to play, but I would have responded to this very differently, were I in a position to do so.
Despite Tehran’s hysterical accusation that the world community is waging ‘psychological war on Iran’, the UN’s demands are actually rather reasonable. It explicitly supports Iran’s right to a peaceful, civilian nuclear programme, as long as it submits to inspections and forgoes the right to enrich its own uranium.
But everyone is naturally making a comparison to Saddam’s sanctions, and that this is a reason to go to war; mindless of the fact that it really is a declaration of war.
And the European Union – led, ironically enough, by Britain – has offered a generous package of incentives if Iran complies, including normalised trade relations, foreign investment and freer travel for Iranians.
Instead, Ahmadinejad has chosen to revert to the revolutionary hooliganism of his student days.
It’s an Islamofascist trait; show strength; dominate the weak. It makes them feel more manly.
But there is hope. Luckily for the British personnel held incommunicado in Tehran, Ahmadinejad is not the only centre of power in Iran’s complex government hierarchy.
Moderate conservatives and reformers, who did so well in December’s local elections, will realise the kidnapping will only increase international pressure on Iran to behave.
That remains to be seen. I would think the only way to make them behave is to line up the battleships in the water and point the guns straight at an Iranian target.
The ransoming of British sailors is the act of a desperate man who feels his power and popularity fast slipping away. His only hope for staying in office is to provoke aggression by Western powers.
Painful though it is to stand by while brave British service personnel are held prisoner, it would be a grave mistake to give him the satisfaction he seeks.
Kidnapping and ransoming has worked for Islamists with westerners, when behind the scenes they’ve negotiated through groups such as Executive outcomes while broadcasting to the world that they don’t recognize or indulge terrorist threats; even when innocents are kneeling in front of them with a sword at their necks.
