How do we deal with our conflicting feelings about Iran’s release of the 15 illegally captured British sailors and marines? The first thing, surely, is to acknowledge that conflicting feelings are perhaps the only legitimate thing to have. As an Englishman who has been settled in America for some time let me vent my first response: this was a national humiliation.
You could see it on Tony Blair’s face: his recognition that he had been bested in global public relations by a psychopathic religious fanatic, and had been forced into what was at best a stand-off with an unscrupulous thug who is busy trying to help kill British soldiers in Iraq.
The captives — subjected to physical threats — had little choice but to cooperate minimally with their captors. We could all have done without the Eurovision boy-band outfits the mullahs creepily put on them for show, but I don’t feel of a mood to condemn sailors and marines held captive by the Revolutionary Guards of an unstable theocracy.
The question of why or how such painfully young, insufficiently armed recruits were deemed suitable for the front line in a global war remains in the air. The Royal Navy will have to answer a lot of questions in due course. But this was surely not its finest hour. What Nelson would have said at such a spectacle of incompetence followed by submission is unprintable in these pages.
And yet I was also intensely relieved to see the stand-off resolved and the young hostages delivered home. Who in their right minds wouldn’t be? Their press conference underlined this relief. There’s always a lot of rhetoric, especially in America, about supporting the troops. But sometimes, that means understanding them as human beings and not merely as pawns.
According to them, they were subjected to blindfolding, mock executions, stripped and told they were in line for up to seven years in an Iranian jail. I don’t know what I’d do in those circumstances. And yes, a lone boat of lightly armed sailors deciding to precipitate a full-scale war between the West and Iran might not have seemed the best idea at the time. In my book, they get a pass.
But do the Blair government and Bush administration? One is naturally sceptical of the assertion that the release was accomplished, in Blair’s words, “without any deal, without any negotiation, without any side-agreement of any nature whatsoever”. But there is no obvious quid pro quo staring us in the face.
Iran’s state-controlled media reported that an Iranian diplomat would now have access to the five Iranians arrested in Irbil — captives whose whereabouts bears close scrutiny in the weeks ahead. And an Iranian official, Jalal Sharafi, also detained in Iraq two months ago, was returned to Tehran last Tuesday. Hmm. In The Washington Post last Friday the very well connected neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer bragged that “American action is what got this unstuck”. Last week, Vice-President Dick Cheney told ABC News radio that he “did not know” if any deal was made. That is, to say the least, an interesting nonresponse to the question.
Nonetheless, when Tehran and London both insist there was no deal, it’s going to be very hard to figure out if there really was one, and we may not know the full details for years. The impact of the event on the global war on terror, however, is still being felt and will continue to play out in the coming weeks. From the American perspective, the response has been, to my mind, revealing about the state of play at this juncture in the war.
The first thing to say is that most Americans seemed indifferent to the crisis. By Friday it wasn’t even on the front pages any more. In my own canvassing of Washington elite opinion, I was struck by how many said they hadn’t taken enough notice to even form a view. This is a memo to Britain, in some respects. An authoritative neoconservative used the incident to berate British weakness and claim American credit for the resolution. Other Bush allies harrumphed at the alleged pusillanimity of their closest ally. The rest barely noticed.
But there was another response as well. Americans in the centre of the debate about the war — those neither in the deadend Cheney-Bush camp nor in the antiwar extreme — saw something new in this incident. They saw actual, sophisticated, calm diplomacy. I don’t think anyone has any illusions about the nature of the regime in Tehran — it is a despicable, inhuman theocracy. But many Americans outside the Bush inner circle also grasp one other central fact: the Iraq debacle has profoundly weakened the leverage the United States has against Iran.
If this incident had escalated to a casus belli — and seizure of another country’s military personnel is a classic departure point for hostilities if ever there was one — then the United States, to put it bluntly, is not ready for conflict.
It is not at all clear whether bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would actually do real damage to the nuclear potential of the country or whether it wouldn’t actually strengthen the elements of the Tehran regime we need to weaken. Moreover, if Tehran decided to ally with Shi’ite militias in waging war on American forces in Iraq, then Bush’s entire surge strategy would be swiftly overwhelmed by new, chaotic, sectarian violence.
It’s also not clear what would happen to the American body politic if the United States had used this moment to launch an attack on Iran. My bet is that the country would hurtle towards a constitutional crisis, with Congress coming close to a veto-proof majority against a commander-in-chief at a time of war. The damage this would do to America internally and in the world at large would be immense.
No sane person in the White House — and one hopes there are a few left — would take such a gamble. The plain, unfortunate truth is, then, that in this moment in time, the West had no real choice but to deal and put the best possible face on it. That goes for Washington as much as London. That’s how boxed in we are — a box of Bush’s making.
The other hideous truth is that the United States could not aggressively invoke the Geneva conventions in this affair. The treatment of the British sailors and marines was a profound violation of Geneva: they were threatened with mock executions, paraded in front of the media and subjected to personal indignity. All of these acts violate the Geneva conventions.
But the United States itself has done far worse in the war on terror, even in those areas of conflict, such as Iraq, where not even Donald Rumsfeld said Geneva did not apply. There is a memo with the president’s signature on it relaxing adherence to Geneva — and one he refuses to revoke. The incident revealed, with painful clarity, how severe the damage that Bush’s detainee policy has done to the long-term war of ideas against Islamism.
And so an obvious lesson emerges: that military force against Iran is not a viable option for the foreseeable future, and that, at some point, some diplomatic attempt to deal with Tehran on a limited agenda may well be necessary. If Iraq had not been bungled, none of this would be the case. In fact, the entire rationale for democratising and liberating Iraq was to undermiSite is currently unavailable .Please come back later.
Andrew Sullivan