Blair steps up the rhetoric over Iran

Britain’s relations with Iran have been deteriorating in recent months, said the FT - and last week “something snapped”. UK government officials and Tony Blair accused Iran of supplying Iraqi insurgents with sophisticated roadside bombs that have killed eight British soldiers and two security guards since May. Britain accepts Iran has legitimate interests in Iraq.

By MoneyWeek

published 7 November 2005

in Features

Britain's relations with Iran have been deteriorating in recent months, said the FT - and last week "something snapped". UK government officials and Tony Blair accused Iran of supplying Iraqi insurgents with sophisticated roadside bombs that have killed eight British soldiers and two security guards since May. Britain accepts Iran has legitimate interests in Iraq.

And until recently believed it was using its "growing influence" to help stabilise Iraq and ensure that its Shia friends dominate the country's leadership. "That view has now changed." Following the collapse of EU-Iran talks on nuclear non-proliferation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA, the nuclear watchdog), Iran has been referred to the UN Security Council, which is set to discuss the question of Iranian nuclear capability in November.

Yet there is no convincing evidence that Iran is behind the bombs - and British and US military sources are sceptical about their politicians' claims, said The Sunday Herald. It is hard to see why Iran might wish to destabilise Iraq now, with their Shia friends set to dominate the Western-backed administration at the expense of the Sunnis. The British and European policy of containment on Iran has worked well in recent years; now Blair's "accusations have heightened tensions in the region and added to fears in the Islamic world that the West is intent on imposing its will on the Middle East, if necessary by the use of force". This makes Blair's sudden ratcheting up of his rhetoric worryingly "reckless". In short, said the Daily Mirror, it's all horribly reminiscent of the sabre-rattling and spin operation that softened up the British public for the war on Iraq.

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Hardly, said Ian Mather in Scotland on Sunday. First, Britain is responding to an increasingly intransigent Iranian government led by the new hardline Islamist president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - as are Germany and France, who also support US moves to have Iran referred to the UN Security Council. Second, Blair let Tehran off the hook by saying we can't be sure whether it, or its Lebanese proxies in Hezbollah, are responsible for supplying the Basra bombs. And third, there is no question of a land invasion of Iran, nor of airstrikes on its nuclear installations, which would trigger a full-scale regional war in the Middle East.

Diplomacy has to be the future when it comes to dealing with Iran, said Michael Rubin in The Observer. Yet it must be the most effective kind of diplomacy - the sort backed up by a credible military threat. This is where Britain has made tactical errors, with Jack Straw unambiguously ruling out military action last month, even as tensions escalated between Iran and the US. As a result, "for terrorists and their sponsors, British restraint is assumed". Talks can repulse the Iranian challenge in Iraq, but "nice words alone are insufficient. Armies, not words, are a diplomat's most potent tool".

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