By Dr Patrick Cronin, Director of Studies; Editor, Adelphi Papers
INTIMIDATION, manipulation and deceit: These appear to be the Iranian government's notion of statecraft.
The recent seizure of 15 British sailors and marines in Iraqi territorial waters is a callous gambit. President Mahmoud Ahmedineijad would rather risk war than lose face.
The diversion will fail, though it speaks volumes about Teheran's hardliners, who are determined to have their way regardless of the consequences for ordinary Iranians.
The Persian Gulf seizure was no accident. One can rule out Iranian propaganda that these sailors had launched an incursion into Iran in a 'blatant act of aggression'. The forced confessions and loose calls for trials conjure up images of kangaroo courts and are vaguely reminiscent of the US embassy hostage-taking during the 1979 Revolution.
Far from being a law-abiding country fighting American double standards and power, Iran seems to want only the thinnest veneer of justice - just enough to justify its headlong pursuit of nuclear power and feed its growing appetite for regional influence.
At a tactical level, according to Arab reports, the operation was calculated retaliation for the arrest and detention of the commander of the Al-Quds brigade, Brigadier Tayshizri, and four other Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps officers from the Iranian consulate in Irbil by US forces on Jan 11, as well as the recent disappearance and possible defection of a key Al-Quds intelligence officer, Colonel Amir Muhammad Hussein Shirazi, in Turkey.
At a strategic level, it is hard not to see the operation as part of a broader plan to promote Iranian regional and nuclear power.
A key fact to consider is that the Commander of the Revolutionary Guards signalled last week his worry over 'accidental war'. This seems a clear indication that Iran was contemplating an offensive act as the United Nations Security Council rapidly reached its inexorable sanctions decision.
Iran's nuclear progress is held back only by technology. Without policy or regime change in Teheran, its nuclear success is just a matter of time.
The taking of British captives is a standard Persian power ploy with the current Iranian government. Iran needed to change the conversation and draw attention away from its own defiance of the UN Security Council by trumping up a phoney crisis. Indeed, sources suggest Iran may have contemplated kidnapping British diplomats before seizing the sailors and marines; clearly grabbing Britons was adjudged in Iran as an issue less likely to escalate than taking Americans hostage.
Iran seems to be taking a page out of Kim Jong Il's playbook. North Korea and the United States entered a second nuclear crisis in 2002 when Pyongyang appeared to be pursuing a highly enriched uranium programme separate from its plutonium reactor at Yongbyon. But six-way talks eventually produced a breakthrough in September 2005.
But the freezing of some US$25 million (S$38 million) of North Korean money in Macau's Banco Asia Delta was met with Pyongyang's brinkmanship in the form of a multiple missile launch on July 5 last year and then a nuclear test on Oct 9.
Only a reversal of US policy prevented the crisis from escalating further and permitted a sixth round of multilateral negotiations.
But such a 'faith-based foreign policy' has left North Korea with its advanced nuclear and missile programmes intact, as well as curtailing financial sanctions on it and allowing it to enter a negotiating process with no end in sight.
Iran may be dreaming of a similar acquiescence by the outside world, and in this strange way a link in the 'axis of evil' has been connected.
Teheran may have calculated that the US and Europe are too timorous and mired in Iraq to contemplate military action and another crisis.
President George W. Bush has just suffered the political humiliation of having the House of Representatives call for a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq - a gesture that, while popular at home, plays into the hands of both Iraqi insurgents and the Iranian regime.
Iran is assuming restraint by the West, but it also hopes the diversion will convert the nuclear crisis into a debate over Iranian 'rights', even though repeated offers have made it clear that its basic rights are not in question.
What is in question is whether Iran's current leadership will be allowed to resort to kidnapping, terrorism, diplomatic deception and proxy war to successfully counter the attempts of the US, Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia and others to limit their brazen nuclear and political ambitions.
The UN Security Council has shown what it thinks of Iran's bluster by unanimously passing new sanctions. Britain has few good options, and Iran's leadership knows it: A rescue mission is risky; an overt military attack would trigger a wider, irregular war; and outright capitulation is out of the question.
While Britain would like to keep this abduction separate from the nuclear talks, Iran wants to show how horizontal escalation is one way to evade tighter financial sanctions, producing a favourable North Korean-type compromise.
Perhaps the only plausible solution to the hostage-taking by Iran would be for two separate events to occur virtually simultaneously: the repatriation of the five Al-Quds officers captured in Iraq, in exchange for the release of the 15 British captives.
Officials in London and Washington should contemplate this deal only if they fully understand what those Iranian Special Forces were doing in Iraq and there is no significant benefit to their detention.
Either way, given Teheran's rewriting of statecraft, we should prepare for a rough rhetorical ride while supporting leaders who refuse to buckle under this crude maritime manoeuvre.
The writer is director of studies of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
