April 01, 2007	Sunday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 12, 1428

LONDON: Tough talk hasn’t worked. Britain didn’t get very far at the UN. And the public’s appetite for more military adventures is low — amid widespread agreement the British military is already overstretched.So despite its outrage, Britain’s options in the crisis over 15 British sailors held in Iran are limited, especially as Prime Minister Tony Blair has ruled out “negotiating over hostages.”

A host of geopolitical factors — from Iran’s nuclear programme to its oil wealth — complicate the delicate diplomatic thrusts-and-parries involved in trying to defuse a dispute in which both sides may find it difficult to make concessions without an unacceptable loss of face.

The seizure of the Britons appears to have been the latest move in an Iranian game of brinksmanship aimed at countering Western pressure on the nuclear issue amid persistent rumblings that Washington may be planning to secure Tehran’s compliance by force.

Tehran’s apparent desire to send out a message of strength — to its own people, its Middle Eastern neighbours, and to the West — means much prestige is at stake.

“Iran is sensitive to US, UK presence on their borders. It could be Iran making a statement, flexing its muscles, saying, ‘You can’t always bully us around — we have some power in this region,’” said Robert Lowe, manager of the Middle East Programme at London’s Chatham House think tank.

Lowe urged Blair “to leave Iran with enough room to manoeuvre to find a way out of this that doesn’t damage Iranian pride.”

Such a solution may be possible: the Iranians may be in no mood to prolong a situation that could have a serious impact on their lucrative oil trade and their growing influence in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. Having made the point it can stand up to the West, Tehran may be eager to return to the tense status quo ante.

Simon Barrett, director of International Media Intelligence Analysis in London, said hard diplomacy — with the threat of financial sanctions — was the only way forward, and dismissed the possibility of a military solution.

“We need to really give them an ultimatum of about ten days to release the hostages or we will apply (more) diplomatic pressure. The first thing is by freezing assets. Secondly, we would need to expel the Iranian ambassador and his diplomatic staff based in the Iranian embassy in London,” Barrett said.

He said the consequences of Britain giving in to Tehran’s demands that it admits to entering Iranian waters and apologise would be serious, predicting it could even motivate Iranian-sponsored Iraqi militia groups operating in southern Iraq to kidnap British soldiers.

It is not only the unpopularity of the Iraq war that makes the military option unlikely; there are also bad memories of past Western attempts to rescue hostages from the Iranians.

In 1980, the SAS stormed the Iranian Embassy in London after six Iranians took 26 hostages to protest alleged oppression of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The siege ended with two hostages dead.

In the early 1980s, the United States suffered a deep humiliation when US forces failed in their attempt to rescue US diplomats held captive in Iran for 444 days.

The SAS, the British army’s elite Special Air Service, does have a good record on rescue missions; in 2000, it freed 11 British army planners from rebels in Sierra Leone, for example. But Iran would prove a more difficult fortress to infiltrate — even if Britain knew the captives’ location, which isn’t clear.

“There’s no way that the SAS could go in and rescue today’s captives because Iran’s security apparatus is so strong and so powerful,” said Barrett.

But Mike Vickers, a former US special forces soldier who also worked at the CIA, said a rescue mission must remain on the table.

“Primarily, the approach is negotiations, and then you’re thinking about what you’re going to do if negotiations aren’t successful and there’s a good opportunity” for a rescue, he said in an interview in Washington. “It depends on where the hostages are, the distance one has to go to get to them, if they’re dispersed or together.”

On Thursday night, the UN Security Council expressed “grave concern” over the detention of the sailors and marines, and called for the crisis to be resolved as soon as possible.

But the statement, agreed to by all 15 members after more than three hours of negotiations in New York, was seen as a blow to Britain because it fell short of “deploring” Tehran’s actions and demanding the detainees’ immediate release.

And looming in the background is the long-standing and unresolved international dispute over Iran’s uranium enrichment, with Western powers suspicious of Iran’s contention that its nuclear programme is aimed at peaceful purposes only.

A prolonged hostage crisis would not help the diplomatic efforts to stop the programme, and an Iran that emerges humiliated from the current standoff may only prove more rigid in its stance.—AP