The Problem With Iran

Some perspective from here on the Iranian-British naval incident last weekend, which has now escalated into "the Iran hostage crisis":

Iran is not seeking a war with Britain. It's understandable that the British government sees the video of the British marines and sailors in Iranian custody as "completely unacceptable," but I see it as a sign that the Iranians want to send a political message and then be done with it. The video showed the Brits eating a meal and sitting around in a group, and it featured the sole British servicewoman "admitting" that they had strayed into Iranian territorial waters. That's vastly different from the images of blindfolded captives paraded before the cameras in a similar incident involving the British navy in 2004 and of course during the American embassy seizure in 1979. Iran's leaders want to send a message, but they are not suicidal. To send the message they saw an opportunity and took it to seize some British servicemen in a way they believed they could plausibly explain as justifiable.

The Iranian regime captured the British personnel to send Washington as well as London three messages, actually: 1) if you attack Iran, we have the capacity to threaten your interests in the Gulf and throughout the Middle East (via Iranian allies in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine); 2) if you continue to ratchet up U.N. sanctions to punish us for exercising our legal right to nuclear technology, you can expect some Iranian-inspired political blow back coming your way; 3) if you detain Iranian Revolutionary Guards officials in Iraq, as U.S. forces did in Erbil on Jan. 11, don't be surprised if Iran's Revolutionary Guards play tit-for-tat.

This incident is extremely delicate and dangerous. What should have been just a misunderstanding that was quickly resolved with a few harsh words has the potential to spin into a major crisis. The context is a U.S.-Iranian Cold War as both countries vie for power and influence in the post-Saddam Gulf. Worse, both countries are currently suffering from injured pride and both have track records of making miscalculations. Bush and Blair are smarting over the mess they made in Iraq; the Iranians are nervous about the saber-rattling against Tehran in some Washington circles, and feel aggrieved that the world is not taking Iran as seriously as Tehran thinks it deserves to be taken (over issues like Iran's nuclear rights, the capture of its officials in Erbil and the State Department's $75 million program to undermine the Islamic regime).

Iran will be irresponsible if it doesn't find a way to declare a small victory and quickly repatriate the British captives. It will be equally irresponsible if either Blair or Bush, accidently or on purpose, pushes the Iranian regime into a corner for the sake of placating home front constituencies that are demoralized by the Iraq fiasco. Any sort of aggression toward Iran is almost certain to strengthen the hard-liners at the expense of the pragmatists and make it more rather than less likely that the crisis will escalate and do so in unpredictable ways. (If nothing else, the U.S.-led war in Iraq has demonstrated that it is impossible to ensure a particular outcome if you start a shooting war in this geo-strategic region.)

The West should not lose sight of the real chance that has been appearing to engage Iran's pragmatists. There has been a struggle for influence within Iran's ruling establishment almost since the day Ahmadinejad entered office. While many of the long-term objectives are shared, what mainly divides the two factions--apart from the usual rivalry of politicians for domestic popularity--is that the hard-liners want to aggressively stand up to the West while the pragmatists believe it is in Iran's interests to be more accommodating. We cannot rule out the possibility that the Brits were seized precisely to tip the balance toward the hard-line camp--or if that wasn't the original intention, that the hard-liners will now try to make use of it to do so. Most serious students of Iranian politics agree that getting tough with Iran will result in the Iranian people uniting behind Ahmadinejad's hard-line rhetoric. I've met the Iranian president twice and he gives the impression of being a true-believer who will not react well to pressure. He is adamant that the U.S. (along with Israel) is run by an unjust government that has spread harm in the world. One of Ahmadinejad's engineering department colleagues at Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran (a fairly "Westernized" fellow who spent many years studying and teaching in the U.S.) told me last year: "He doesn't want war, but sometimes you have to fight for your rights. He is ready to die. He is that kind of man. He is a brave man."

The scenario to avoid is "Lebanon, Summer '06." The Iranian-backed Hizballah staged a raid into Israel and captured two Israeli soldiers. It seems that the group wanted to score some political points, and perhaps help out Iran, which was facing the prospect of U.N. sanctions at the time. But by Hizballah's own subsequent account, it misjudged that Israel would launch such a ferocious counterattack that caused massive damage in Lebanon and left more than 1,000 Lebanese dead. In turn, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert misjudged Israel's ability to fight Hizballah and was forced to withdraw from Lebanon without achieving any permanent aims or even the release of the two soldiers. He certainly didn't calculate that today, nearly eight months later, his approval rating would stand at something like 2%. Nor did Condi Rice imagine things would turn out this way when she described the Israel onslaught in Lebanon as the "birth pangs of a new Middle East."

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo