Do you smell that delicious aroma in the air? That’s the sweet smell of freedom.
Everyone can breathe easily, because after nearly two weeks of tense negotiation, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced last Wednesday that the 15 sailors taken hostage in the Persian Gulf would be turned over to the British Embassy in Tehran.
“They are free after this meeting, and can go back to their families,” Ahmadinejad declared at a press conference. British Prime Minister Tony Blair welcomed the news “as a profound relief not just to them but to their families that have endured such distress and anxiety over these past 12 days.” A situation that stirred images of the Gulf of Tonkin instead ended peacefully, and the entire international community breathed a collective sigh of relief. I guess we can all stop thinking about Iran now, right?
Wrong. That the British sailors are out of harm’s way is no indication of Iran’s desire to make peace with the West. The situation was doomed to spiral into a convoluted blame game from the moment it started. When members of the Iranian Coast Guard captured the British crew members at gunpoint on March 23, Iran’s government denounced the ship’s “illegal entry” into Iranian waters.
Not so fast, said the British Foreign Office, which maintained that the two patrol boats on which they were operating were well within Iraqi waters. Throughout the negotiation process, both sides emphasized that the other was in the wrong. Now, after the matter, neither side appears ready to back down on their claims.
I say, what difference does it make? The distance between where British officials claimed the ships were and where Iran says they were is less than two nautical miles, in waters whose borders have long been under dispute. Even if the Brits were in Iranian waters, as they have confessed on Iranian television (confessions purportedly made under coercion), Iran’s reaction made about as much sense as a lifeguard taking children hostage for swimming out past the buoys.
Iran’s decision to capture those crew members, who, according to the British Ministry of Defense, were “engaged in routine boarding operations of merchant shipping in Iraqi territorial waters,” sent a message to the rest of the world: We are Iran, and we play by no one’s rules. It’s a great motto for a B-rate action movie. International politics? Not so much.
But that didn’t stop Ahmadinejad – just like economic sanctions from the U.N. haven’t put a stop to his nuclear ambitions. Talk about sending mixed messages; it would be much easier to believe Ahmadinejad’s claims that their nuclear plans were for energy-related purposes if not for his nasty habit of encouraging Palestinian attacks against Israel, and of his wishes for the “disgraceful blot” of a country to be “wiped off the face of the earth.”
This hostage situation, however, deserves a closer look because at its heart is the underlying problem in dealing with Iran, a problem that almost guarantees the rift between them and the western world to widen before it shrinks – or explodes. The problem is that while most countries have one leader to supervise and maintain the national defense, Iran has two. There’s Ahmadinejad, the president. And then there’s Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader. Ahmadinejad is the highest elected official in the country, in charge of enacting policy and nominating most public officials to their positions. But Khamenei controls foreign policy and the army, as well as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who were responsible for capturing the British sailors at sea.
The U.S. is keeping a close eye on Iran – as well they should. Some may view it as hypocritical for the United States to criticize Iran’s methods of operation. The Bush administration continues to invent fun new legal twists to Habeas Corpus and the Geneva Convention, and photos of prisoner abuse go from one hand to another to the New York Times and the six o’clock news faster than anyone would like. But a key difference exists between the two country’s actions: Reports of misconduct by the U.S. come in the midst of a long, bloody war; Iran appears hell-bent on starting a new one.
In the meantime, Ahmadinejad continues to defy the international community’s demands to halt the enrichment of uranium and appears, to some extent, to be involved in aiding insurgent efforts in Iraq. Estimates say Iran will have nuclear capabilities in eight to ten years; a new war could come sooner. It doesn’t have to, but U.S. foreign policy over the past thirty years suggests it may be inevitable. Iran took a huge gamble by holding those sailors hostage. And they dodged the bullet – this time. Next time they might not be so lucky. But on the bright side, we might finally find some WMDs.
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