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Blair’s New Tune on Iran
By James G. Forsyth
10/23/05 "Foreign
Policy" -- -- British officials used to be certain
that a military attack on Iran was out of the question. Now, it
seems, they’re not so sure.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has decided to play hardball with
Iran. Frustrated by the lack of progress in negotiations over
Tehran’s nuclear program, the British—who used to give Iran the
benefit of the doubt—are now hedging their bets on nuclear diplomacy
by using Iran’s meddling in Iraq to make military options more
palatable to the British public.
Blair’s policy of treating Iran with kid gloves was born out of the
conviction that Iran would soon evolve into a democracy. In 1998, a
year after Blair won his first election, full diplomatic relations
were restored between Britain and Iran (despite the fatwa on British
author Salman Rushdie remaining in place). Jack Straw became the
first British foreign secretary to visit Tehran since the Islamic
Revolution in 1979. Straw assured the Iranians they were not a
target in the post-9/11 war on terror.
Now, though, the tide is turning. Jonathan Lindley, a Middle East
expert at the Royal United Services Institute in London, says that
the prime minister’s office has decided to use “more stick and less
carrot” in its relations with Iran. The first evidence of this new
approach came early this month, when a British official accused Iran
of supplying the Basra insurgency with bombmaking technology via
Hezbollah. The next day, Blair himself repeated the charge. That was
a turnaround from previous statements, when British officials had
argued that the Iranians were actually helping in Iraq by acting as
a calming influence on the more excitable Shiite groups.
Then on October 11, the Foreign Office’s Middle East Minister, Kim
Howells, declared in a Parliamentary debate that if Iran were to
acquire nuclear weapons, it could give momentum to proposals for
Britain to upgrade its own nuclear arsenal. Howells ended the debate
by responding to calls from members of parliament for a tougher
policy toward Iran with a cryptic message, suggesting that the
government is no longer quite as certain that it will never strike
Iran’s nuclear facilities. “[T]he world of diplomacy requires one to
choose language very carefully. My right honorable friend the
foreign secretary said that he could not envisage any circumstances
in which there would be some sort of armed response to the problem
of nuclear proliferation. I hope that the honorable gentleman will
understand what I am saying.”
That same day, British officials privately briefed The Sun, a
jingoistic tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch. They told The Sun’s
reporters that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was training bombmakers
and smuggling them into Basra to kill British troops. The newspaper
treated the story in a way the briefer must have anticipated. The
headline roared, “Trained in Iran to kill our boys.” The choice to
leak to The Sun, as opposed to briefing a more subdued or dovish
publication, suggests that Blair was trying to whip up public anger
toward Tehran. “They could depend on [that kind of spin], given
everything The Sun has written about Iraq,” says Stephen Glover, the
media commentator of the daily Independent. “The Sun has been the
most bellicose supporter of British and American policy in Iraq. A
fairly safe bet, on the government’s part, that it would continue to
be so in relation to Iran.” If the government’s intention was to
influence pundits, rather than the general public, The Times—also
owned by Murdoch—would have been the more logical choice. And if the
aim was simply to disseminate information, the bbc would have been
the obvious venue.
So, why is this new British approach taking the form of a covert
domestic pr blitz? The British public, which did not go through the
emotional trauma that Americans experienced during the Iranian
hostage crisis, has generally been unconcerned by the prospect of
Iran’s acquiring the bomb. But it has felt burned by Iraq. After the
past four years, Blair simply doesn’t have the political capital to
sell another intelligence-driven war. Without any increase in public
concern over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, British threats to support
military action against Iran are hollow. And there is no better way
to drum up anger than by telling the public that the Iranians are
responsible for the deaths of British soldiers.
The Iranians, of course, know what is going on. The Iranian
ambassador to Britain recently complained that Iran does “not expect
the British to use Iraq to put pressure on Iran during nuclear
negotiations.” If Iran can persuade the British public that
accusations about Iran’s involvement in Basra are being used to
build support for a possible military action, this new strategy will
fail. Following the “dodgy dossiers” on Iraq’s weapons of mass
destruction, people are not inclined to give Blair the benefit of
the doubt. For now, however, London seems determined to use Iraq to
strengthen its hand in the nuclear negotiations. The success of this
approach depends on how seriously Tehran takes the threat of an
Israeli or U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The victory of hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran’s June
presidential elections dented British hopes that a Tehran spring was
about to bloom. Instead, we now may be in for a bitter cold winter
of tough nuclear talk.
James G. Forsyth is assistant editor at FOREIGN POLICY.
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