Middle East
Mar 27, 2007 Page 2 of 2
Iran: A mountain that doesn't move
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
British sailors could be directly connected to London's leading role against Iran in the nuclear row. This raises the prospect of a long ordeal over the sailors, who Iran claims have "confessed" to transgressing into Iranian waters.
Already, a top Iranian lawmaker has supported the action by Iran's Revolutionary Guards in taking the sailors and hinted at lengthy legal proceedings, much to the chagrin of the British government,
which has demanded their immediate release.
A political analyst close to the government told this author that Tehran may not release them until all the Iranian "hostages" in the United States' hands are free. Six diplomats and scores of others, deemed "agents" by the US, are in its custody. London's plans to extricate itself quietly from Iraq may now be in jeopardy.
From Iran's vantage, however, what matters is to drive home the point, expressed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei last week, that those who inflict pain on Iran will have to pay a price.
The escalating crisis may not, after all, develop into the kind of air campaign that the likes of US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh have been penning for some time. Rather, it is beginning to spiral in an entirely different direction that poses a serious threat to regional and international peace - that is, small skirmishes combined with proxy attacks, hostage-taking, intelligence war and the like, which can easily trigger bigger and deadlier showdowns.
Again, Iran insists that the nuclear dispute is "easily resolvable" through candid negotiation, and to that effect it has given an implicit nod to the so-called Swiss proposal that calls for "dry centrifuges", that is, putting enrichment on "hot standby" to give negotiation some breathing space.
Unfortunately, the US has given this and similar proposals the cold shoulder and is simply keen on piling up the pressure on Tehran to comply with its demand for a complete halt to its uranium-enrichment program and the construction of a heavy-water reactor in Arak.
But what if Iran frustrates the rosy expectations of the diplomats devising the US approach in this crisis? Is the US willing to risk a nightmare regional conflagration then?
Already, given the growing interlocking of the nuclear crisis and the Iraq crisis, the fate of the next multilateral security summit on Iraq scheduled for Turkey next month has been cast under a cloud of uncertainty, and it is fairly certain that things will grow worse instead of getting better any time soon.
Time might be running out on the United States' international coalition against Iran, in light of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's call for respecting Iran's right to produce nuclear fuel. Manmohan made this policy announcement in a recent meeting with former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami.
In addition to India, Iran can now count on growing support from Indonesia, South Africa, many Latin American nations and, indeed, most of the developing world. With the bubble of "international consensus" with regard to Iran's supposed nuclear threat wearing thinner and thinner and about to burst, and with the indirect infusion of Israel into Security Council debates, as mentioned above, Iranian policymakers are not about to throw in the towel and resign themselves to the pressures of sanctions.
With a mixture of a hard-power approach in Iraq and the region on the one hand and soft-power diplomacy in the world community on the other, Tehran is betting on causing a sea-change in terms of sympathy for its stance against the hypocrisy of the nuclear-armed states that control the Security Council.
This is a high-price gambit that may backfire on Iran, as some claim it already has, with reports of Russian technicians leaving the Bushehr nuclear power plant they have been building in Iran unfinished. And many still believe that Iran needs to show a serious willingness to accommodate the anxieties of the international community over its nuclear program.
European diplomats addressing the Security Council this weekend uniformly reiterated the European Union's seriousness about the comprehensive offers of nuclear assistance submitted to Iran last June. Iran reacted somewhat favorably to that "international package of incentives" and should now re-examine the package and seek a formal answer to its response.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction .
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing .)
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Los Cuerpos de la Guardia Revolucionaria Islámica de Irán capturaron el viernes (23) a 15 marinos de la Armada Real que se desplazaban en botes inflables sobre aguas territoriales iraníes, según afirmó el gobierno de ese país.

La captura se produjo cuando los marinos británicos hacían una redada a un barco de carga sospechoso de contrabandear automóviles. En ese momento, barcos militares iraníes los rodearon y los capturaron.

El ministro de relaciones exteriores de Irán, Manouchehr Mottaki, acusó al grupo de militares de haber cometido un "acto de agresión" contra la República Islámica. "El cargo contra ellos es el de entrada ilegal en las aguas territoriales iraníes", dijo Muttaki en conferencia de prensa entregada en Nueva York.

Por su parte, el primer ministro británico, Tony Blair, afirmó que el incidente era "serio" y demandó de Irán la "liberación inmediata" de los militares. Al día siguiente, Blair calificó la captura como "injustificada e incorrecta". Gran Bretaña insiste en que sus fuerzas navales operaban en aguas territoriales iraquíes.

El incidente se presentó horas antes de que el Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas aprobara el endurecimiento de sanciones contra Irán por rehusarse a detener el proceso de enriquecimiento de uranio.

Algunos grupos políticos en Irán empezaron a hacer presión para que los capturados sean llevados a juicio por violación de la soberanía, mientras que grupos más radicales quieren que su liberación se haga sólo a cambio de la liberación de seis diplomáticos iraníes y varios otros agentes capturados por las tropas estadounidenses en Iraq y que todavía permanecen retenidos. La prensa árabe afirma que Irán podría estar buscando la liberación del general retirado Ali Reza Askari, presumiblemente secuestrado por la CIA y la Mossad el 9 de diciembre en Estambul.

Según analistas el hecho constituye una escalada en un tipo de confrontación por medio de escaramuzas, toma de rehenes, guerras ''proxy'', guerra de inteligencia entre las partes enfrentadas que en cualquier momento puede desembocar en hechos más serios con resultados fatales.