Iran Watch: Diplomatic Provocation

In his now-famous sermon-com-ultimatum issued to the people of Iran on 3 June, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei made a startling comment that took his most seasoned listeners by surprise. While trying hard to establish a link between Iran’s protest movement and various foreign powers, he blurted out several disparaging statements against the United Kingdom, which at first glance may have seemed odd and out of context.

“I recommend to all the gentlemen, old friends and brothers,” he told millions of TV viewers and worshipers, “to…see the hands of the enemy. You must see the stalking hungry wolves which have removed their diplomatic masks and have shown their true face…the most wicked of which is the government of England.”

At that time, most observers attributed this strange outburst to the ayatollah’s well-known penchant for spinning wild tales of conspiracy in his foreign policy statements. It had to take another 14 days before the full import of Khamenei’s threat was finally brought home.

Using the same altar Khamenei had used on 19 June, aytollah Ahmad Jantai, Tehran’s fire-spitting Friday Prayer Leader, announced that some Iranian-born members of the British Embassy staff who had been arrested earlier on conspiracy charges would be placed on trial for fomenting unrest.

In the preceding days, an escalating series of accusations in the hardline media had already whipped up the atmosphere against England to unprecedented new levels. What the newspaper articles and TV programs purported to show was that a nefarious link existed between Iran’s indigenous protest movement and the UK government in conjunction with the BBC.

Beginning on 1 June, groups of young militant Muslim activists have taken to gathering in front of the British embassy in Tehran, screaming insults and throwing rocks at the embassy compound.

As any impartial observers could have freely attested, England’s role in the domestic Iranian dispute is non-existence.

The birth of the protest movement has been as much a surprise to the Iranians as it has been to the British government. Under the circumstances, the arrest and the trial of UK embassy personnel on trumped-up charges is clearly designed to elicit an angry response from London.

According to an Iranian academic familiar with the workings of the Islamic Republic, this was exactly the effect sought by the incident’s plotters.

“In my opinion, this whole anti-British frenzy has been brilliantly conceived,” he told ISN Security Watch. “There is a reservoir of suspicion and mistrust towards Britain by some Iranians going back to the 19th century, which is obviously being tapped into.”

According to the academic, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the government badly needs to find an excuse to justify its violent crackdown. The protest movement, which was triggered by massive voting fraud in the 12 June election, is the hardliners’ worst crisis of legitimacy in 30 years.

What’s more, despite heavy repression, the Green Wave movement of Mir-Hossein Mousavi - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s main rival in the presidential elections - shows no sign of abating. Mousavi has refused to accept the legitimacy of the Ahmadinejad government and his supporters have vowed to start an endless campaign of civil disobedience until their demands are realized.

A major diplomatic confrontation with the UK clearly serves the hardliners’ interests by deflecting attention internationally from their domestic abuses.

However, there are other less overt, if more significant, reasons that may explain the motivation behind this latest provocation.

First, as long as nuclear negotiations with the 5+1 are postponed, Iran benefits by increasing the number of its spinning centrifuges and by getting closer to the so-called breakout option - a stage where a country can start building nuclear arms in a short order of time if it so wishes.

Second, presently, the domestic turmoil has clearly robbed the government of the backing of significant portions of the population and the elite. This means that in its foreign parleys, the government would have to negotiate from a position of weakness.

For instance, although US President Barak Obama has all but ruled out the use of the military option in Iran, the fact of the matter is that in the event of a war with a hostile force, the Iranian regime can no longer depend comfortably on its home front for security; a parameter that must have been taken into consideration by Iran’s military and strategic planners.

According to sources in the know, many in the Iranian elite, particularly within the hardline circles, are clinging to the hope that in a few months’ time the crisis will blow over and they can safely return to the negotiation table from an improved position once again.

Therefore, a verbal and diplomatic clash with the UK escalating into a manageable quarrel with the west is clearly in the hardliners’ best short-term interests. (As far as economic fallouts, England is not a major economic partner of Iran and a breakup of commercial ties would have had a tolerable impact on Iran’s own economy.)

Perhaps for the same reasons, many western governments - including the US, Germany and even the UK - have taken a relatively restrained stance toward Iran’s actions. On 3 June, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, while condemning aytollah Janati’s announcement, stopped short of responding in kind to Iran’s actions.

For its part, for the past few weeks and up until now, the Obama administration has studiously avoided giving the Iranian hardliners an excuse to move against the protesters or to call off its upcoming talks with the 5+1.

In a 31 June panel at the conservative Heritage Foundation, Kenneth Katzman, a top Iran expert at the US Congressinal Research Service whose views on Iran are believed to be close to some policy-makers in Washington, said that he believed it was wrong to postpone talks with Iran because at this moment “they [the Iranians] would be negotiating from a weaker position.”

The Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz quotes diplomatic sources in New York as suggesting that in the upcoming G-8 talks, President Obama will try to dissuade other governments from imposing harsh economic sanctions on Iran because of its large-scale human rights violations.

Of course, this doesn’t imply that the world community would remain indifferent to a stage-managed show trial in Tehran of the British embassy personnel. The EU has announced that if Iran did make good on its threat to put the embassy personnel on trial, all 27 EU member states would recall their ambassadors and downgrade ties with the Islamic state.

While there are factions within Iran that would welcome such a dangerous escalation, there are many other factions in the establishment whose economic benefits mitigate against such a rash decision.

At this moment, the ball is clearly in Iran’s court and the next few days will illustrate which conservative faction in Iran has the upper hand in final decision-making.