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2 US dangles tempting bait for
Iran By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has
warned that the standoff over the detained British
sailors in Iran is on the verge of reaching a
"critical stage" and has done so in the immediate
aftermath of a conciliatory statement by Iranian
National Security Adviser Ali Larijani regarding
Iran's lack of intention to put the sailors on
trial.
But what if the sailors are not
released immediately? Is Blair really prepared to
"take it to the next phase" and escalate it on all
fronts? At the moment, both Blair and Foreign
Secretary Margaret
Beckett insist they have
economic and diplomatic, not military, pressures
in mind. Yet a poll in Britain indicates that
nearly half the population favors the military
option "as a last resort", and this ratio may go
up instead of down depending on what happens in
the next few days or so.
Britain said in a
statement on Tuesday that it was waiting for a
response from Iran over a proposal for "direct
bilateral discussions" to resolve the standoff.
The statement said London and Tehran had had
"further contacts", including directly with
Larijani. A British team of high-level experts,
including naval officers, lawyers and diplomats,
is ready to fly to Iran at short notice should
Tehran give the nod.
Meanwhile, the US has
released Jalal Sharafi, a diplomat from the
Iranian Embassy in Iraq, which is timely, but then
again this can be interpreted in two ways. It
could be a gesture of goodwill by the US, in light
of the upcoming Iraq security summit in Istanbul,
and Defense Secretary Robert Gates' stated
willingness to engage with Iran on high levels.
Or, alternatively, it could be "bait" that
bolsters the hands of Iranian hardliners who are
pushing for a quid pro quo, ie, a swap of
Iranian hostages in the United States' hands with
the British sailors apprehended by the
Revolutionary Guards.
So the pertinent
question is: What is the United States' true
motivation, noble and peace-directed, or geared to
lengthening what President George W Bush has
already coined as a "hostage crisis"?
With
Bush closing the cognitive gap between the Iranian
"hostages" and the situation of the British
sailors, and this at a time when even British
officials are not using that description, and
insisting that "there will be no quid pro
quo", the desired result may have been none
other than to promote the seductive notion of a
tit-for-tat among the Iranians.
Iran might
yet go for the bait. But for the moment, given the
intense factional debate inside Iran over this
subject, it is conceivable that the United States'
initiative of releasing the Iranian diplomat will
not serve the declared "noble" intention of
crisis-deescalation but rather, in a curious
twist, fuel it.
After all, now the
Iranians are disposed to thinking: If after two
weeks of holding on to the British sailors we got
one of our own free, why not keep them longer to
get the rest out?
The trouble with this
thinking is that it misperceives the motives of
the other side and the counterproductive results
of a lengthy ordeal that will strengthen the hands
of anti-Iran hawks in Washington and further
isolate Iran at a delicate time in the nuclear
row.
Already, a number of powerful Majlis
(parliament) deputies affiliated with the majority
hardline faction known as osoolgarayan have
criticized Larijani for his "weak stance" and have
rejected his assurance of "no trial" for the
sailors as soft and inappropriate.
Henceforth, in the intense policy
tug-of-war inside Iran, external catalysts such as
the United States' move will play a decisive role
in tipping the balance in favor of one or other
faction. This is why it is incumbent on Iranian
politicians not to misread the situation and to
avoid any policy "traps".
The force of
Iranian public opinion is equally important and,
unfortunately, because of New Year holidays and
the Iranian
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