Sir Malcolm Rifkind was Foreign Secretary and Secretary of State for Defence in the last Conservative Government.
Ever since the capture of 15 sailors and marines on the Shatt al-Arab waterway, there has been an unnerving sense of déjà vu. As history since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 shows all too clearly, the Iranians are no strangers to tactics of this kind.
Now, as then, the regime is nervous because of outside pressure: a second unanimous Security Council resolution, targeted at Iran’s nuclear programme, has recently tightened sanctions and stepped up the freeze on regime assets.
To Tehran, the question of whether the British service personnel were in Iranian or Iraqi waters is essentially unimportant. What matters is the opportunity for additional leverage. The brazen seizure of the marines and sailors is one way of doing this. They have already demonstrated their ability to create instability in Iraq through their close links to Shia militias and through disrupting traffic in the Persian Gulf.
A further possible motive lies with the recent US capture of five Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the north of Iraq. In the eyes of Tehran, the British service personnel may serve as a useful bargaining tool in any final deal. But the US has rejected a swap, and so it should. A deal such as this would create an appalling precedent, encouraging the use of kidnapping as a foreign policy weapon across the Middle East.
Given the nature of Iran’s motivations, and the evident difficulty in securing an immediate release of the prisoners, what else can be done? Margaret Beckett and the Foreign Office have correctly taken the issue to the United Nations and have secured valuable diplomatic support from nations such as Turkey and Iraq. They have also signalled Britain’s strong determination by publicly demanding the release of the personnel, and by providing proof that they were taken from Iraqi waters.
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