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2 A Falklands War in the Persian
Gulf By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
"Rejoice! Rejoice!" Those were the words
of the British "Iron Lady", then-prime minister
Margaret Thatcher, exactly 25 years ago when she
broke the news about the capture and scuttling of
the Argentine submarine ARA Santa Fe off the
island of South Georgia, at the opening of what is
known as the Falklands War (Spanish: Guerra de
las Malvinas).
That was the "good war"
that carried Thatcher to re-election victory, a
far cry from the "bad war" in Iraq bedeviling the
current
and
outgoing prime minister, Tony Blair. But with the
growing crisis over the detained British sailors
fanning the flames of patriotism in both Iran and
Britain, and incessant criticisms of weak
responses by the Foreign Office in nearly all
British papers, Thatcher nostalgia is rising
steadily, particularly in light of the similar US
backing of Britain in both cases.
In the
Falklands War, then-US president Ronald Reagan
turned his back on a fellow Western Hemisphere
nation and backed Britain. Similarly, today we
find the US throwing its weight fully behind
London, in light of President George W Bush's
statement on Saturday calling for the immediate
release of the British sailors deemed "innocent
hostages".
Clearly, the ties that bind
Washington and London run too deep to expect a
balanced, fair-minded approach that would avoid
rushing to judgment by adopting the
much-controverted British version of facts and
thus acting as the judge and the jury without an
iota of attention to the Iranian side of the
story. Thus, unless the diplomatic efforts
currently under way bear fruit, the gathering
storms of a fourth Gulf War rekindling memories of
the Falklands War may be inevitable.
There
are, of course, stark dissimilarities between the
two cases, as Iran is adept in asymmetrical
warfare and can strike back at the British forces
in southern Iraq, compared with the Argentines,
who did not have much leverage. Moreover, the
surrounding circumstances are not particularly
favorable to the US-UK side either, given the
recent denunciation of "illegitimate foreign
occupation" of Iraq by King Abdullah of Saudi
Arabia, endorsed by the Arab summit.
Interestingly, a number of right-wing
media pundits in the United States, such as Briton
Niall Ferguson in the Los Angeles Times, have been
oblivious to the differences between the Falklands
War and the crisis over the British sailors, eg,
the latter is an extension of an illegal war in
Iraq threatening a wider war with a recalcitrant
regional player unwilling to submit to Western
hegemonic designs.
To open a parenthesis,
Ferguson's warmongering and Thatcher nostalgia
remind us of his pro-Iraq-invasion columns when he
unabashedly predicted that the Iraqi people would
embrace the invaders "with open arms" and that it
would be "relatively short campaign".
Learning nothing from their erroneous past
predictions, Ferguson and a number of other US
pundits are now pushing for another glorious war,
this time in the name of British "honor". For the
moment, however, the prewar stage is being set by
a media campaign over semantics: Hostages or
prisoners?
War over
semantics "Kidnapped sailors", read a CNN
headline the other day, and when this author
objected in the course of his interview with CNN
International, as tantamount to the lack of
neutrality and a sign that the network was biased
against Iran, the program host insisted that no
one in CNN subscribed to that terminology and that
turned out to be on CNN/US but not CNN
International.
Thus the term "a second
hostage crisis" seeping into the US media, drawing
parallels with the 444-day US Embassy hostage
crisis in 1979-80. Certainly, few people in Iran
are in favor of such a scenario, and former
president Mohammad Khatami has echoed the
sentiment of many Iranians by warning about the "a
new disaster" potentiated by this crisis.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr
Mottaki has, meanwhile, spearheaded a moderate
stance by dispatching a formal letter of protest
to the British government and demanding a written
guarantee that there will be no more trespassing
of Iranian territory by the British forces. After
initially dismissing the letter, Mottaki's British
counterpart, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett,
has sent a formal response that is reportedly
somewhat conciliatory, opening the door for
diplomacy.
While we await the results of
the flurry of diplomatic activities, which
includes the intervention of Turkish and Iraqi
politicians, as well as by United Nations
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, the struggle by
both sides over which terms to use to win over
world public opinion continues.
Holes
in the British version Craig Murray, a
former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and former
head of the Foreign Office's Maritime Section, has
drilled effective large holes in the official
story put out by the British government.
According to Murray, there are no
recognized Iran-Iraq boundaries in the Persian
Gulf, where the incident took place. "Blair
adopted the stupid and confrontational approach of
publishing maps and ignoring the boundary dispute,
thus claiming a blurry situation is crystal-clear
and the Iranian totally in the wrong." Criticizing
the Blair government's lies in "doctoring" the
"faked maps", Murray has been the lone voice in
the wilderness of British media daring to question
the official story.
The British tabloids,
evincing what is aptly coined by a commentator as
a "hysteric Anglo-Saxon response", would have none
of that and, unfortunately, their jingoistic
sensationalism has rubbed off on such mainstream
papers as The Times, whose columnists have also
aired their sudden nostalgia for the Iron Lady.
The Independent, on the other hand, has
somewhat distinguished itself by a spate of
commentaries questioning Blair's new respect for
"international law", which according to the paper
"has little morality" given his bleak record with
respect to the invasion of Iraq, deemed "illegal"
by the former UN chief, Kofi Annan. [1]
The only problem with Murray's incisive
debunking of the British official story, however,
is that he overlooks a potential hidden motive,
ie, London's ability to reinsert itself in Iraq's
long-term (geo) political calculus by the mere
initiative of offering a map that, while it has
come as a total shock to Iraqi officials,
nonetheless serves to play a role in future
Iran-Iraq negotiations over their maritime
boundaries.
In light of Murray's keen
observation that the British map shows the
boundary drawn closer to the Iranian than the
Iraqi shores, Iran had no choice but to reject it
and, if need be, take this "jurisdictional" issue
to the international forums, in light of the
pressing issue of customary international law
that, in the absence of such objections, would
make the British-inspired imaginary lines in the
Persian Gulf stick.
Incidentally, the
websites of the US government, including the
Central Intelligence Agency Factbook on Iran,
clearly state that there is no recognized boundary
between Iran and Iraq in the Persian Gulf. Thus
the question: On what basis has President Bush
accepted the British explanation that the said
sailors are "innocent" and were in Iraqi waters
when arrested? The same
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