The Persian Game

The 15 British marines and sailors captured by Iran twelve days ago have been ‘pardoned’ and  released.

Is it Round 2 to Iran?
Round 1 went to them the day US forces swept into Baghdad. In one fell swoop the Americans got rid of two of Iran’s biggest enemies, Saddam Hussain and the Taliban/Al Qaeda combine on its Eastern border, and by extension, their Pakistani influence. Without lifting a finger, Iran watched as its neighbourhood was cleaned up by the Americans, and in the process became the biggest beneficiary of Gulf War II. With militant (Saudi sponsored) Sunni Wahhabism becoming the  Americans’ headache, Saddam gone, and with him their main Arab challenge, Iran was actually looking at the rise of Shia Persia again.

So, what was the March 23rd maritime action all about? Very little is still known about the background and circumstances surrounding this extraordinary event.  The British were extremely cautious of the volatile situation throughout, and even the Iranians, normally not given to brevity in such situations, remained unusually tight-lipped about their actual motives, though the propaganda volume was turned all the way up.

Persepolian hubris, or a desperate recklessness brought about by a growing sense of international isolation?
It’s probably neither. Some incidents leading up to the March 23rd action seem to suggest a pattern in Iranian behaviour. Was the capturing of the British soldiers due to last-minute panic at a plan gone wrong? Is there more to it than meets the eye?

A brief timeline:

1. New York Times reports that the first EFP (Explosively Formed Penetrators) may have been used on Coalition forces way back in August 2003.

2. The same article also mentions that it was only in July 2005 that the Americans lodged their first formal protest with Tehran (through Swiss diplomatic channels) accusing Iran of providing the lethal weapons and training to Iraqi Shia fighters. This claim slowly becomes louder as the British Ambassador to Iraq and Prime Minister join in, after a British soldier is killed and a Japanese convoy is ambushed in mid 2005. More Iranian involvement is detected as a British helicopter is downed by what looks like Iranian shoulder-fired missiles. And now we know that US soldiers had a firefight with Iranian forces in Iraq’s eastern province of Diyala bordering Iran on September 7, 2006. An Iranian soldier was killed, according to reports from the US Army, which of course, cannot be independently verified.

That the Iranians are involved in Iraq is completely logical. What it is doing is no different from what the United States did during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan – fomenting insurgency against an accupying power in a third country to advance its own strategic interests. It is in no way unethical, if such a term makes sense in a state of war, or even unexpected.

So, with things going their way and progress (from their viewpoint) being made at a rapid pace, why go out and capture fifteen british sailors and put a spanner in the works, not to mention antagonize even the few friends that they still have, namely China and Russia? Even the British had been calling for a diplomatic solution to the Iran nuclear crisis of late.

Iran has multiple centers of power, which often end up being competing centers of power, each with its own political and military base. Ahmadinejad may be the President, but final authority in this complex Islamic state lies with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the ‘Supreme Leader’. This is the reason it is very difficult to pin-point rationale behind any of Iran’s actions. Moreover, the IRG – the Islamic Revolutionary Guards or the Pasdaran, with their own land forces, air-force and navy, which carried out the March 23rd action, is not answerable to Ahmadinejad’s elected government, but to Khamenei. They have traditionally been ultra-nationalistic and sympathetic to extremist ideology. But the capture of the British sailors was not the action of a fanatical out-of-control militant outfit. Far from it. The IRG is a professional, well-trained and well-equipped military force, and they are not squeamish when it comes to unorthodox warfare, which should be well borne out by the fact that they are responsible for creating, training and turning Hezbollah into what it is today.

Prior to the incident in the Strait of Hormuz, a few interesting things transpired in Iran’s neighbourhood that bear mentioning:

1. An US raid on a Baghdad compund of a Shia leader in late December 2006 results in the arrest of two Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ al-Quds Brigade officials (link), one of whom has “detailed weapons lists, documents pertaining to shipments of weapons into Iraq, organizational charts, telephone records and maps, among other sensitive intelligence information“.
A January raid resulted in six more Iranians being captured by US forces, again including two Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers.

2. 6th Feb: Jalal Sharafi, the Second Secretary in the Iranian embassy in London, is abducted at gun-point in Baghdad. Tehran is inflamed…accuses the US of being behind the kidnapping.
[Sharafi has since been released after almost two months in captivity.] 

3. 8th Mar: Former Iranian Deputy Defence Minister and Revolutionary Guard  general Ali Reza Asgari ‘disappears‘ in Istanbul, Turkey. He is believed to have defected, presumably to the United States. Mossad is one of the key suspects. He had intimate knowledge of the IRG’s Lebanon operations and the Iran’s nascent nuclear program.

4. Some websites (mostly right-leaning American blogs with questionable sources) report that  IRG intelligence officer Brig. Gen. Seyed Mohammed Soltani also ‘vanished’ in Istanbul, defected to the west with the active ‘help’ of Mossad and the CIA.

5. 14th Mar:The Iranian Army reports that it has lost contact with one of its high ranking officers of the Jerusalem Brigade, based in Iraq, amid fears that he has been picked up by American forces.

6. Muqtada al-Sadr is no longer in Baghdad, claims various news sources. All indications point to the fact that he has fled to Iran.

Though it may be ambitious to assume that all these events are inter-related, it does seem likely that a certain amount of panic may have set in within Iranian intelligence services at that point. The adequate response to this situation may have become a casualty of the power struggle between the moderate and more extreme elements within the Iranian political hierarchy. An indication of this is the  Feb 12th raid on former reformist President Kahatami’s office in Tehran by ‘unidentified’ people.
Added to it is the fact that the IRG, whose loyalties lie with the more hardline Khamenei, carried out the action against the British. Ahmadinejad, of course, cut his political teeth as a student activist during the other successful (from the Iranians’ POV, ending as it did with the Algiers Accord) American hostage crisis of 1979. So it would have been a natural path for them to go down.

But what was the British frigate doing in the Shaat-al-Arab anyway? If they were there as part of a UN mandate (Security Council Resolution 1723), why were they in disputed waters? Why did they quietly give in without a fight? What were they looking for in the merchant ship that they boarded? After all, with modern GPS aided navigation, it is impossible to stray too far from your intended route.
From a BBC.com ‘Have Your Say’ interchange:
“There is something very fishy going on. HMS Cornwall is a state of the art ship with a radar tracking system that would have seen the Iranian boats as they left port. Why did the captain of HMS Cornwall not go to cut off the Iranians?. Why did the gemini boats not fight or at least run away when they saw the six boats coming?. No RN captain would send its people out without protection! Either the captain is an incompetent fool OR he was ordered to stand by and do nothing!’ — Beryl Hutchinson, Larnaca, Cyprus

‘Knowing the waters well and having been myself ‘captured’ by the IRG, something smells here. Cornwall had the eye in the sky (helicopter) watching overhead, the zodiac boats can do 30 knots and the interdict was approx 2 miles from Cornwall. How did they not see the Iranian fleet steam up and ’surround’ the zodiacs? How do you surround a rubber dinghy capable of 30 knots. Or is this the issue the USA has been needing to justify an offensive move against Iran?’ — Phillip Carr, Sherborne “

Whatever be the known or unknown unknowns, to paraphrase Rummy, it is undeniable that Iran has been able to milk this incident to the fullest. It has managed to announce to the world that it is capable of causing severe political disruption, and that it will not back down in this eyeball to eyeball military and intelligence game of chicken. In the process it has also managed to obtain the release of Jalal Sharafi and put major pressure on the Americans for the release of the remaining Iranian captives without once mentioning the phrase ‘prisoner swap’. It has also effectively turned attention away from the much hyped, but essentially toothless, UN sanctions imposed on the same day that this crisis began.

~ by Shubho on April 4, 2007.