Iran's new hostage crisis

By seizing 15 British sailors, the embattled Iranians aim to rally anti-Western sentiment and force the Brits from Iraq.

By Juan Cole

Read more: Tony Blair, Iran, Britain, Iraq, Opinion, Juan Cole, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Photo: Reuters/Stringer

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (right) listens as Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks on March 12 to members of the Expediency Council in Tehran.

April 3, 2007 | The lofty invocations of international law by the British and Iranian governments disguise the banal origins of their current dispute: used cars. The British naval personnel had boarded an Indian vessel they thought was smuggling old automobiles into Iraq. Tehran maintains that they then veered into Iranian waters.

It is not really about used cars, of course, but rather an unpopular and isolated Iranian government attempting to rally support and strengthen itself. The capture by Iranian Revolutionary Guards of 15 British sailors and marines on March 23 has set off a diplomatic crisis and mobilized the public in both Britain and Iran. The ever combative Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared Saturday "that instead of apologizing to the Iranian nation, the British were acting as if Iran owed them something." A member of the Parliament in Tehran called for the British personnel to be tried for espionage, while the Iranian Embassy in Thailand asked other nations to denounce what it called a British trespass into its sovereign territory. On Sunday, a small crowd of some 200 demonstrators threw stones and firecrackers at the British Embassy in Tehran. It was not much of a demonstration, and Iranian police kept them in check when they tried to storm onto the embassy grounds.

British public opinion was inflamed on Sunday after Iranian television showed the captured seamen admitting that they had strayed into Iranian waters at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which forms the disputed border between Iran and Iraq. Iran seemed to be vying with 1950s North Korea for the title of creepiest brain-washer. Former 1st Sea Lord Adm. Sir Alan West decried the performance of the sailors as a product of coercion and sniffed that it "does not reflect the price of fish."

Although Britain insists that a global positioning signal demonstrates that the British boat was in Iraqi waters, in fact the maritime border between Iraq and Iran has never been agreed upon by the two neighbors. Military action seems an unlikely way to secure the release of the soldiers, and Tony Blair's government has given up threats of moving into a "different phase" and has focused on intensive negotiations. "We are anxious that this matter be resolved as quickly as possible and that it be resolved by diplomatic means, and we are bending every single effort to that," British Secretary of Defense Des Browne said on Sunday. "We are in direct bilateral communication with the Iranians."

Britain, an advanced technological society, has the world's second-most-powerful military, and a GNP per capita of $33,000. Iran is still a developing country, with a per capita income of only $2,800, despite its oil wealth. Why would the Iranian leadership risk such a confrontation over a minor issue? Even if the British boat had strayed into Iranian waters, it could not have been by much, and nations routinely grant such passage to nonbelligerent vessels. The conflict is not about incursions into sovereign territory any more than it is about used-car smuggling.

With Iran facing huge challenges at home (an economy in tatters) and abroad (mounting pressure over its nuclear program), Ahmadinejad and his reluctant patron, the Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei, desperately needed a diversion. The capture of the British personnel by the Revolutionary Guards may have been opportunistic, but Tehran's hard-liners think they know how to play it. They are trying to use the incident to rally the public around the flag and revive their flagging fortunes on the geopolitical stage with appeals to Iranian patriotism. They also see tactical advantages in the hostage taking that might help weaken the British and push back against the Americans in Iraq.

The regime of Khamenei is in fact deeply unpopular in Iran, especially among youth and women (who together make up the vast majority of the population). These groups had helped to elect the reformist president Mohammad Khatami, who received 70 percent of the vote and served from 1997 to 2005, and who worked for a loosening of puritanical restrictions on personal freedom. His "Second of Khordad" movement, named for the date of his electoral victory, took over the elected Parliament and pushed for a relaxation of press censorship. Fewer than 20 percent of Iranians voted for conservatives in that period. Alarmed, Khamenei and his allies in the theocratic part of the Iranian government rallied to crush the reform movement, an endeavor in which they largely succeeded. They closed down liberal newspapers and forbade liberals to run for office.

While Khatami had won by a landslide in elections with high turnout, his successor, Ahmadinejad, barely got into office in 2005, after a lackluster campaign for which there was little popular enthusiasm. Ahmadinejad and his parliamentary allies won only because Khamenei had excluded the more attractive candidates. Ahmadinejad had campaigned on a populist platform of economic reform in a society where most people struggle to get by while fat-cat mullahs and well-connected businessmen from the bazaar control billions. In reality, he has made the lot of most Iranians worse, a fact that has not escaped them. In the wake of serial budget deficits, the country has faced a sharp rise in inflation and unemployment.

Abroad, Iran was humiliated by American raids on intelligence agents in Iraq. The United States still holds five Iranian officials, captured in Irbil, to the outrage of the Iranian public and the helplessness of the government in Tehran.

Next page: Tehran's designs to force the Brits out of southern Iraq