Sign 'ere Gunga Din

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It is amazing how quickly things deteriorate once they start. Certainly Rudyard Kipling would have a hard time making any sense of all this. Bush's idol, Winston Churchill must be getting up quite a torque in his grave.

Iran has truly taken the "West's" measure. This is useful information for all of us if studied quietly.

The bright side is that it is hard to imagine a war breaking out in such a low comedy atmosphere, but of course it could. Maybe that is the real tragedy of our times. DS

Anger over Iran hostages' media deals - Guardian
Abstract: The Ministry of Defence and the Royal Navy were accused of undermining the reputation of Britain's armed forces last night over the decision to allow the 15 sailors and marines held by Iran to sell their stories to the media. The navy's move to suspend its usual rules - taken "as a result of exceptional media interest" and with the agreement of the defence secretary, Des Browne - was condemned by opposition politicians, former officers and the families of dead service personnel. Faye Turney, the only woman in the crew, has agreed a joint deal with the Sun newspaper and ITV's Tonight With Trevor McDonald for close to £100,000. But amid the complaints about the decision, fears were voiced that it has devalued the work of other serving forces and handed Iran a propaganda victory.(...) Colonel Tim Collins, who commanded the 1st Battalion the Royal Irish Regiment in Iraq, said: "This episode has brought disgrace on the British armed forces and it comes from complete ineptitude at the top." He contrasted this case with the capture of 11 members of the Royal Irish Regiment in Sierra Leone. "They were held hostage and there was a real chance that they would be killed before they were eventually rescued by the SAS. There was not so much as a peep out of any of them afterwards, no talk and certainly no mention of money." Mike Aston, whose 30-year-old son, Corporal Russell Aston, was one of six military policemen killed by a mob in Majar al-Kabir, Iraq, in June 2003, said he was "absolutely amazed" by the MoD's stance. "I think to actually sell [my] story it would besmirch my son's memory." Ms Turney, whose salary as a leading seaman is recorded as being between £23,535 and £29,576, was interviewed by Sir Trevor McDonald ahead of a screening tonight. She gave a separate interview to the Sun, telling the paper she had been kept on her own in a small cell for five days and had at times feared for her life. Ms Turney was one of the personnel absent from a joint press conference held by six of the crew on Friday and agreed a deal with the Sun and ITV that day. William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, told Sky News's Sunday Live: "If, whenever people have been in a difficult situation, they are going to be allowed to sell their story quickly after that, then I think we are going to lose steadily that dignity and respect for our armed forces." READ IT ALL

Hearing the message from Tehran

In dealing with Iran, support for possible military action is in the single digits (8 percent).
Public Agenda's Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index, conducted in association with Foreign Affairs Magazine

David Seaton's News Links
Depending on what they want to see, commentators are speculating on the possible meaning of the resolution of the captive British sailor crisis. Complex theories about conflict among the "hardliners" and "moderates" in Tehran abound.

People are reading the tea leaves on this too closely, I believe. It is all really very simple. What you see is what you get.

Iran has proved several things. They have proved that they could do something militarily and politically significant anytime they wanted to, they proved they could do it for as long as they wanted to and they could stop doing it at the moment of their choosing. With this simple expedient Iran dominated the world headlines and television news day after day. Plainly put, Iran changed the subject of the conversation. The question stopped being, "what will be done to Iran?" and became, "what will Iran do?". And all this was done very cheaply, if you compare it with passing UN resolutions (and enforcing them) and maintaining a huge naval force in the area. And of course:

"There's been a $5 or $6 premium that's been built into the price of oil over this," said Phil Flynn, vice president and energy analyst at Alaron Trading. "Even though this crisis has ended, the oil market is still on guard that the tensions in the Middle East are going to continue." ABC - NEWS

Another thing Iran did was to test the reaction of Western public opinion to possible armed conflict with Iran... It was extremely tepid. As we can see from the poll quoted at the top less than 10% of the American public is behind military action. Among the allies 0.0%. The only people still hot to trot are some right wing Israelis... who knows, that might be enough to get a war started, but not to finish it.

And as we can see we can see from the "Condi and Nancy Show", American diplomacy in the Middle East, like the US Army is a broken toy. Iran is playing with the disintegration of America's position in the Middle East. "Hard" is really not the same as "complicated". DS

The essential Iran

"Forty-eight percent of Germans think the United States is more dangerous than Iran, a new survey shows, with only 31 percent believing the opposite.(...)(in) a Forsa opinion poll commissioned by Stern magazine. Young Germans in particular -- 57 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds, to be precise -- said they considered the United States more dangerous than the religious regime in Iran."
Der Spiegel

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I include below an editorial from the Washington Post, which is typical of the speculation floating around the capture of the British sailors by Iran. Lots of speculation about possible divisions in Iran's leadership; speculations about the success or lack of it of the UN sanctions. Is it really all that complicated? I don't think so.

The United States is making a huge effort to isolate, pressure and intimidate Iran, this has meant an enormous calling in and of extending I.O.U.s. Most countries have been hauled kicking and screaming into this. Despite this full court press, as we can see in the quote from Der Spiegel above, world public opinion is not behind any conflict with Iran. (A similar poll in Spain would show far worse numbers).

Here is another example: Timothy Garton Ash, published an article ln The Guardian yesterday, (reprinted in the LA Times) hysterically demanding that the European Union stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain in this crisis and if they didn't, Garton-Ash demanded, "What is the EU for?". It was interesting to skim through the reader's comments in The Guardian and I suggest you follow the link and read them. Overwhelmingly the readers were opposed to Garton-Ash's arguments. "Boo, fucking, hoo!" one reader wrote in. Another, signed in as "Weeper", if less colorful, was more explicit and neatly summed up what the majority of readers opined.

"Very convenient to be "European" when it suits us while sleeping in US's bed most of the time. Why is Britain now provoking Iran on behalf of the US, hasn't it enough trouble in Afghanistan and Iraq? And the scandal of the prisoners being shown on TV! A lot worse than 650,00 deaths (probably nearer 1 million now, not counting the 1st "Gulf War" and 10 years of sanctions) Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, cluster bombs, DU, and beating Iraqi civilians as shown on UK TV and for which no one was found guilty, don't you think. I hope that the Brits learn such a lesson from Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran, that they never again set out on another mad imperial adventure on behalf of US/Israel." - "Weeper", commenting on T. Garton - Ash in The Guardian

Bottom line: There is practically no public opinion siding with the USA, what support there is shallow and meant more than anything else to keep up appearances, while hoping that, "something may turn up". The Arab League meeting in Riyadh didn't even mention the hostages!

By simply taking 15 British hostages (balance that cost against the US maintaining two carrier battle groups in the zone) Iran bloodlessly exposes how shallow that support is and how little the USA controls the situation. Meanwhile,the price of oil was climbing toward $70.

Also, any military threat against Iran's atomic installations would have to take into account how simple it would be for Iran to share out the hostages among those installations. That among other things, is what hostages are for. It is hard to imagine, given how thin the support for armed action is, both in the world at large... and in the USA itself, that lame ducks Bush and Blair could try anything more than a "surgical strike" if that. Iran would survive it and its victory in terms of prestige in the third world would be immense.

I don't see anything but lose/lose here for Britain/USA/Israel here. The party that began when H.M. Abdul Aziz ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia met Franklyn Delano Roosevelt on board the U.S.S. Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake of Egypt on February 14th, 1945 is drawing to a close. DS

The Results of Diplomacy - Editorial - Washington Post

(...) Administration officials were encouraged by signs of dissension in the Iranian leadership after the first of two unanimous sanctions resolutions passed the Security Council in late December. Before the second resolution was introduced, there were talks between Iranian and European officials about ways to renew negotiations. Yet the Iranian work on uranium enrichment has continued; there are signs the regime is racing to complete an industrial installation with thousands of centrifuges that it can present to the world as an accomplished fact.

Now Iran is parading captured British sailors before cameras and using their purported confessions of trespassing in Iranian waters as propaganda in a way that suggests an eagerness to escalate rather than defuse confrontation with the West. Yesterday, Britain offered evidence that its service members were captured in international waters and rightly called their treatment "completely unacceptable." Though Iran's foreign minister said a female sailor would be released "very soon," the television broadcast suggested the prisoners had been coerced.

It's widely believed that power in Iran is divided among competing factions, and it could be that hard-liners are seeking to preempt any steps by the regime to comply with the Security Council. It's impossible to predict what might come out of Tehran before the next U.N. deadline in late May. Yet what has happened so far is sobering.

Bush administration officials have been congratulating themselves on the relative speed and deftness with which the latest sanctions resolution was pushed through the Security Council. They are right, in a way: The diplomatic campaign against Iran has been pretty successful by the usual diplomatic measures. Not only has the United States worked relatively smoothly with European partners with which it differed bitterly over Iraq, but it has also been effective lately in winning support from Russia, China and nonaligned states such as South Africa.

Critics who lambasted the administration's unilateral campaign against an "axis of evil" a few years ago ought to be applauding the return to conventional diplomacy. We, too, think it's worth pursuing, especially when combined with steps short of a military attack to push back against Iranian aggression in the region. Still, two years after President Bush embraced the effort, it has to be noted: The diplomatic strategy so far has been no more successful than the previous "regime change" policy in stopping Iran's drive for a nuclear weapon.