OldReliable said:
Agreed with all of your points save one: "they've shown that they will respond to diplomacy." They have demonstrated support for all of your other points, "responding to diplomacy" does not necessarily follow.
Well, keep in mind I'm talking about what perception will be, not what reality is.
The point is that they released the sailors without military action on Britain's part. Military action against them therefore becomes that much more difficult to justify.
OldReliable said:
But, where was the Iranian apology for violating the various GC rules? They are, after all, signatories to the GC, and the world saw their violation of several of those articles.
We (meaning, we here on these boards) don't know for certain that they violated GC rules. In the absence of certainty, I'm witholding judgement and looking at the
realpolitik involved.
I think it's very easy to accuse someone we identify as "other" while simultaneously downplaying accusations leveled at those we identify as "us." It's much more difficult to listen objectively to two sides of a conflict.
My opinion is that the Iranians were in the wrong at least to have held the sailors as long as they did; I don't think that's justifiable even had those sailors been in their waters (unless there was good evidence of espionage). If the Iranians believed they were in Iranian waters, I could see holding and interrogating them for a few days before releasing them. We'd do the same. We might or might not treat them as well as the Iranians treated the british captives. We might or might not have forced confessions from them (just as the Iranians might or might not have done here--though I suspect they did).
The British sailors may or may not have been in Iranian waters--I suspect that at least by British reckoning, they weren't. I also suspect that we are aware, and Britain is aware, that those borders are disputed, and it's quite easy in such situations to provoke a
cassus belli such that both sides feel justified in engaging in conflict. And I also suspect, but cannot prove, that this is exactly what was going on here. Again, I would bet long odds that something came up in the middle of this whole deal, something held by a foreign country with an interest in de-escalation, that kept it from escalating.
However, I wouldn't put it past Ahmadinejad to have played a very shrewd move here. In any form of conflict (I learned the strategy from playing chess), if your opponent has a winning attack, it is possible to weaken that attack or even defuse it altogether by making it happen faster than your opponent had planned. Critical pieces get left out and your opponent's position is weakened, leaving you either a counter-attack or an escape that your opponent didn't have time to block off.
I think in this case there's a pretty obvious factor of time involved in attacking Iran. We know their strategy will be to shut down the straits of Hormuz and effectively block about half of all OPEC production, which would make very unpleasant times for the world. Part of our strategy for softening the blow is to increase the SPR to one billion barrels. That plus existing inventories should buy us roughly 100 days to get the straits open and knock out Iran's ability to re-block it--a task our navy is at least potentially capable of doing. However, we haven't even re-filled it from the Katrina draw-down; and we won't be able to until later this year.
Another Iranian strategy in any potential conflict will be to foment increased insurgency in Iraq and Afganistan. We're in the process of stationing more troops there to not only support ground operations inside Iran, but to prevent this counter-thrust. We don't have all the necessary troops in place yet.
Iran is aware of both of these facts (I can find them out on the internet, after all).
We couldn't wait until all that was in place to start shopping for a pretext, though, as that would be too transparent--we have to plausibly deflect Russian and Chinese criticism and possible involvement. So Britain operates in disputed waters, certain that American carrier groups in the gulf are deterent enough to prevent any really iffy action on Iran's part. They do so with confidence that we will be able to pick the time for provoking a pretext. But Iran seizes an opportunity to accelerate our winning attack, fizzling it out before key preparations are made. To get an attack on Iran, we need to paint them as defiant and aggressive, unwilling to listen to reason. The fact remains that this now becomes much more difficult to do.
