Within hours of the news breaking of the British sailors’ capture, Western TV networks were already declaring that they had been taken as “hostages” in a premeditated “raid” by the Iranians and zeroed in on maps provided by the British government purporting to show that the spot in the middle of the Shatt-al-Arab waterway where the British navy personnel were picked up was on the Iraqi side of an internationally recognised maritime boundary. Never mind that no such boundary in fact exists! In fact, as the former British diplomat (and former head of the UK Foreign Office’s Maritime Section) Craig Murray pointed out; there are no internationally recognised boundaries between Iraq and Iran anywhere in the Persian Gulf. This is confirmed by the websites of both the US State Department and the CIA. Moreover, the maps produced by the British government for media consumption during the recent “crisis” inexplicably seem to show an arbitrary line drawn closer to the Iranian shore than that of Iraq.
No mention was made in the media coverage either of the recent covert operations by British counter-intelligence inside Iran’s south eastern Khuzestan province (right next to Shatt-al-Arab waterway). Nor the fact that commander of the British naval patrol captured had openly admitted when interviewed only weeks earlier by UK Sky TV that a core part of his mission in interdicting fishing vessels in the waterway was to gain intelligence on the Iranians. Citing fears about the safety of the captured sailors, Sky TV chose to release this interview only after they had all been released by the Iranian government.
Now since the release of the captured sailors many stories have been spun about alleged psychological torture employed by the Iranians to get them to confess on Iranian State TV to violating Iranian territorial waters. Yet whatever the truth of these allegations it needs to be emphasised that the British and Americans are guilty of equal or worse crimes in their treatment of Iranian diplomats being held illegally in Iraq.
On 3 April an Iranian diplomatic attaché from the embassy in Baghdad was freed after being having been abducted by Iraqi special forces working in collusion with the CIA two months previously, during which time he had also been tortured in a bid to extract information. Meanwhile the five Iranian diplomats taken prisoner by the US in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Irbil in January on trumped up charges of supplying weapons to the Iraqi resistance have still not been released.
The one positive to come out of this latest “crisis” involving the West and Iran has however been to discredit those right-wing pundits pushing for a military assault on Tehran. Britain was able to secure the release of the captured sailors only after it retreated from its earlier bellicose rhetoric (threatening Iran with increased sanctions and pressuring the EU and UN to do likewise) and moved on to the track of diplomacy. The release of the Iranian diplomatic attaché in Baghdad was a calculated concessionary gesture towards the Iranian government and it appeared to work. By implication therefore those who advocated a military response would seem to have lost credibility in the eyes of the Western public, since the Iranian government has clearly signalled that although it will not be bullied with threats it is prepared to respond favourably to calm and reasoned negotiation.
(This piece originally written for The Spark, paper of the Workers Party of New Zealand)
