The Problem With Iran
Posted by Scott MacLeod
Time Middle East blog
Scott MacLeod has been TIME's Middle East correspondent since 1995 and is based in Cairo. He was TIME's bureau chief in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1989-95. His 30-year career in journalism also included 10 years with United Press International, reporting between 1975-84 from the U.S., London and Beirut.
Some perspective from here on the Iranian-British naval incident last weekend, which has now escalated into "the Iran hostage crisis":
Iran is not seeking a war with Britain. It's understandable that the British government sees the video of the British marines and sailors in Iranian custody as "completely unacceptable," but I see it as a sign that the Iranians want to send a political message and then be done with it. The video showed the Brits eating a meal and sitting around in a group, and it featured the sole British servicewoman "admitting" that they had strayed into Iranian territorial waters. That's vastly different from the images of blindfolded captives paraded before the cameras in a similar incident involving the British navy in 2004 and of course during the American embassy seizure in 1979. Iran's leaders want to send a message, but they are not suicidal. To send the message they saw an opportunity and took it to seize some British servicemen in a way they believed they could plausibly explain as justifiable.
The Iranian regime captured the British personnel to send Washington as well as London three messages, actually: 1) if you attack Iran, we have the capacity to threaten your interests in the Gulf and throughout the Middle East (via Iranian allies in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine); 2) if you continue to ratchet up U.N. sanctions to punish us for exercising our legal right to nuclear technology, you can expect some Iranian-inspired political blow back coming your way; 3) if you detain Iranian Revolutionary Guards officials in Iraq, as U.S. forces did in Erbil on Jan. 11, don't be surprised if Iran's Revolutionary Guards play tit-for-tat.
(The rest is here.)
Time Middle East blog
Scott MacLeod has been TIME's Middle East correspondent since 1995 and is based in Cairo. He was TIME's bureau chief in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1989-95. His 30-year career in journalism also included 10 years with United Press International, reporting between 1975-84 from the U.S., London and Beirut.
Some perspective from here on the Iranian-British naval incident last weekend, which has now escalated into "the Iran hostage crisis":
Iran is not seeking a war with Britain. It's understandable that the British government sees the video of the British marines and sailors in Iranian custody as "completely unacceptable," but I see it as a sign that the Iranians want to send a political message and then be done with it. The video showed the Brits eating a meal and sitting around in a group, and it featured the sole British servicewoman "admitting" that they had strayed into Iranian territorial waters. That's vastly different from the images of blindfolded captives paraded before the cameras in a similar incident involving the British navy in 2004 and of course during the American embassy seizure in 1979. Iran's leaders want to send a message, but they are not suicidal. To send the message they saw an opportunity and took it to seize some British servicemen in a way they believed they could plausibly explain as justifiable.
The Iranian regime captured the British personnel to send Washington as well as London three messages, actually: 1) if you attack Iran, we have the capacity to threaten your interests in the Gulf and throughout the Middle East (via Iranian allies in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine); 2) if you continue to ratchet up U.N. sanctions to punish us for exercising our legal right to nuclear technology, you can expect some Iranian-inspired political blow back coming your way; 3) if you detain Iranian Revolutionary Guards officials in Iraq, as U.S. forces did in Erbil on Jan. 11, don't be surprised if Iran's Revolutionary Guards play tit-for-tat.
(The rest is here.)
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