CC Blog

CC Malayalam Blog

Join News Letter

Iraq War

Peak Oil

Climate Change

US Imperialism

Palestine

Communalism

Gender/Feminism

Dalit

Globalisation

Humanrights

Economy

India-pakistan

Kashmir

Environment

Gujarat Pogrom

WSF

Arts/Culture

India Elections

Archives

Links

Submission Policy

Contact Us

Fill out your
e-mail address
to receive our newsletter!
 

Subscribe

Unsubscribe

 

A Falklands War In The Persian Gulf

By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

03 April, 2007
Asia Times Online

"Rejoice! Rejoice!" Those were the words of the British "Iron Lady", then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher, exactly 25 years ago when she broke the news about the capture and scuttling of the Argentine submarine ARA Santa Fe off the island of South Georgia, at the opening of what is known as the Falklands War (Spanish: Guerra de las Malvinas).

That was the "good war" that carried Thatcher to re-election victory, a far cry from the "bad war" in Iraq bedeviling the currentand outgoing prime minister, Tony Blair. But with the growing crisis over the detained British sailors fanning the flames of patriotism in both Iran and Britain, and incessant criticisms of weak responses by the Foreign Office in nearly all British papers, Thatcher nostalgia is rising steadily, particularly in light of the similar US backing of Britain in both cases.

In the Falklands War, then-US president Ronald Reagan turned his back on a fellow Western Hemisphere nation and backed Britain. Similarly, today we find the US throwing its weight fully behind London, in light of President George W Bush's statement on Saturday calling for the immediate release of the British sailors deemed "innocent hostages".

Clearly, the ties that bind Washington and London run too deep to expect a balanced, fair-minded approach that would avoid rushing to judgment by adopting the much-controverted British version of facts and thus acting as the judge and the jury without an iota of attention to the Iranian side of the story. Thus, unless the diplomatic efforts currently under way bear fruit, the gathering storms of a fourth Gulf War rekindling memories of the Falklands War may be inevitable.

There are, of course, stark dissimilarities between the two cases, as Iran is adept in asymmetrical warfare and can strike back at the British forces in southern Iraq, compared with the Argentines, who did not have much leverage. Moreover, the surrounding circumstances are not particularly favorable to the US-UK side either, given the recent denunciation of "illegitimate foreign occupation" of Iraq by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, endorsed by the Arab summit.

Interestingly, a number of right-wing media pundits in the United States, such as Briton Niall Ferguson in the Los Angeles Times, have been oblivious to the differences between the Falklands War and the crisis over the British sailors, eg, the latter is an extension of an illegal war in Iraq threatening a wider war with a recalcitrant regional player unwilling to submit to Western hegemonic designs.

To open a parenthesis, Ferguson's warmongering and Thatcher nostalgia remind us of his pro-Iraq-invasion columns when he unabashedly predicted that the Iraqi people would embrace the invaders "with open arms" and that it would be "relatively short campaign".

Learning nothing from their erroneous past predictions, Ferguson and a number of other US pundits are now pushing for another glorious war, this time in the name of British "honor". For the moment, however, the prewar stage is being set by a media campaign over semantics: Hostages or prisoners?

War over semantics

"Kidnapped sailors", read a CNN headline the other day, and when this author objected in the course of his interview with CNN International, as tantamount to the lack of neutrality and a sign that the network was biased against Iran, the program host insisted that no one in CNN subscribed to that terminology and that turned out to be on CNN/US but not CNN International.

Thus the term "a second hostage crisis" seeping into the US media, drawing parallels with the 444-day US Embassy hostage crisis in 1979-80. Certainly, few people in Iran are in favor of such a scenario, and former president Mohammad Khatami has echoed the sentiment of many Iranians by warning about the "a new disaster" potentiated by this crisis.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki has, meanwhile, spearheaded a moderate stance by dispatching a formal letter of protest to the British government and demanding a written guarantee that there will be no more trespassing of Iranian territory by the British forces. After initially dismissing the letter, Mottaki's British counterpart, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, has sent a formal response that is reportedly somewhat conciliatory, opening the door for diplomacy.

While we await the results of the flurry of diplomatic activities, which includes the intervention of Turkish and Iraqi politicians, as well as by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, the struggle by both sides over which terms to use to win over world public opinion continues.

Holes in the British version

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and former head of the Foreign Office's Maritime Section, has drilled effective large holes in the official story put out by the British government.

According to Murray, there are no recognized Iran-Iraq boundaries in the Persian Gulf, where the incident took place. "Blair adopted the stupid and confrontational approach of publishing maps and ignoring the boundary dispute, thus claiming a blurry situation is crystal-clear and the Iranian totally in the wrong." Criticizing the Blair government's lies in "doctoring" the "faked maps", Murray has been the lone voice in the wilderness of British media daring to question the official story.

The British tabloids, evincing what is aptly coined by a commentator as a "hysteric Anglo-Saxon response", would have none of that and, unfortunately, their jingoistic sensationalism has rubbed off on such mainstream papers as The Times, whose columnists have also aired their sudden nostalgia for the Iron Lady.

The Independent, on the other hand, has somewhat distinguished itself by a spate of commentaries questioning Blair's new respect for "international law", which according to the paper "has little morality" given his bleak record with respect to the invasion of Iraq, deemed "illegal" by the former UN chief, Kofi Annan. [1]

The only problem with Murray's incisive debunking of the British official story, however, is that he overlooks a potential hidden motive, ie, London's ability to reinsert itself in Iraq's long-term (geo) political calculus by the mere initiative of offering a map that, while it has come as a total shock to Iraqi officials, nonetheless serves to play a role in future Iran-Iraq negotiations over their maritime boundaries.

In light of Murray's keen observation that the British map shows the boundary drawn closer to the Iranian than the Iraqi shores, Iran had no choice but to reject it and, if need be, take this "jurisdictional" issue to the international forums, in light of the pressing issue of customary international law that, in the absence of such objections, would make the British-inspired imaginary lines in the Persian Gulf stick.

Incidentally, the websites of the US government, including the Central Intelligence Agency Factbook on Iran, clearly state that there is no recognized boundary between Iran and Iraq in the Persian Gulf. Thus the question: On what basis has President Bush accepted the British explanation that the said sailors are "innocent" and were in Iraqi waters when arrested? The same question applies, mutati mutandis, to the European Union, whose foreign ministers passed a unanimous resolution denouncing Iran's action as "contrary to international law". But, really, is it?

Question of international law

The crisis over the British sailors in fact provides raw material for a fresh consideration of the applicability of international laws in Persian Gulf in that Iran's official position is that the salient facts of the case are in conformity with the guiding criteria of the UN's Law of the Sea Treaty.

Contrary to US pundits such as Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who debated the author on CNN over the weekend, there is no clear-cut "established international law" that would dictate the freeing of British sailors if found in Iranian waters.

A glance at the proceedings of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg, Germany, makes it obvious that there are several precedents for the seizure of foreign vessels in territorial waters. Nor is there a right of "innocent passage" that could be invoked by the British government in defense of its jailed sailors, given the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea's conditions, ie, that a vessel's passage is not "threatening to sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence", or the "good order and security" of the coastal nations.

Article 301 of this treaty is pretty clear that intruding ships "shall refrain from any threat". Article 25, paragraph 3, on the other hand, stipulates that a coastal state may suspend in its territorial waters the right of "innocent passage" of any vessel it deems threatening to the country.

From a strictly legal point of view, the British sailors cannot be effectively deemed detained until the time when an Iranian judge upholds their seizure by the Iranian armed forces. The initiation of a legal proceeding against the sailors serves precisely this particular purpose, setting the stage of a subsequent Iranian "forum shopping" in international law, even though a full trial may not be either necessary or advisable, politically and internationally.

The EU statement above-mentioned cites the UN mandate for the stability functions of British forces in Iraq. This is clumsy diplomacy by the EU, since (a) it reminds us of how badly the UN was manipulated to bestow legitimacy on an illegal invasion and (b) fails to notice that the UN mandate does not extend into Iran's territorial waters.

Until now, the EU had safely distanced itself from the disastrous Middle East policies of the Blair government, and yet the crisis over British sailors has allowed Downing Street to bridge the gap and create an EU "groupthink" on Iran that is tantamount to dragging the entire European Community into the mess of London's making.

The rule-minded EU cannot possibly emulate London when it comes to Iran's territorial rights, mimicking Blair's callous disregard for the sovereign rights of Iran repeatedly infringed on by the British forces, beginning in summer 2004 when eight sailors were released after the British Foreign Office formally apologized. According to Ali Larijani, the head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, the No 2 diplomat at the British Embassy in Tehran had pledged in writing that no more transgression of Iran's maritime boundaries would occur.

Since last autumn, the Iranian press has reported about several intrusions into Iranian airspace and waters by British forces. On one occasion, British helicopters hovered near the city of Khoramshahr for 10 minutes, and in February there was a report of three British naval vessels entering Iran's waters.

Thus, notwithstanding the absence of conclusive proof by the British, the counter-facts and counter-claims by Iran, and the surrounding circumstantial evidence pertaining to the British hostilities toward Iran, recalling Blair's key speech last November when he stated unequivocally that there was no softening of London's stance toward Iran, Iran's hands at a hypothetical international court are hardly empty.

The merits of Iran's complaints may even trump those of the British counter-complaint, all the more reason for the British government to be concerned about the unintended consequences of its overreaction by internationalizing the incident so quickly, not to mention the dangerous escalation in Basra, where there are reports of stern action against the Iranian consular building by British forces.

Diplomatic options

A powerful Iranian parliamentarian, Alaedin Boroujerdi, has called for a special British fact-finding committee to visit Iran. Since Britain is part of a larger political unit that is the European Union, this could be extended to an invitation by an EU delegation to Iran, given the dire warning of the EU for further action if Iran does not release the sailors.

London has frozen bilateral trade with Iran and is lobbying the EU to do the same, which, if it happens, will damage the EU's economy as well as Iran's by affecting several thousand companies.

With the economic, let alone security and other stakes being so high, the EU should not put its diplomacy in London's, and by implication Washington's, hands, and it would be disastrous for the Union, celebrating its 50th birthday this year, if it slips down the warmongering path charted by Blair-Bush, the twin lame-duck leaders who have done more than their fair share in wreaking havoc on the international order.

Again, from the prism of international law, it is feasible to hypothesize a scenario whereby the British sailors would post bail and be placed in the hands of the British Embassy in Tehran, and the matter would be adjudicated with the consent of both parties in either the International Court of Justice or the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.

One advantage of the latter tribunal is that it makes more explicit the relevance of international laws of the sea with respect to the Persian Gulf. Various experts in international law have opined that the Law of the Sea Convention weakens the US-led Proliferation Security Initiative, which has led to the interdiction of shipping to and from North Korea, as a dress rehearsal for similar interdiction of shipping to and from Iran, in light of the UN sanctions on Iran.

In conclusion, should Tehran opt to reciprocate London's sensationalist internationalization of the standoff by resorting to one or another international legal forum, the net result will be a timely "juridification" of the Persian Gulf's security calculus, tantamount to a timely Iranian soft-power counter-move to the huge influx of Western hard power in the volatile oil-rich region.

Note

1. For more on international law and Iran's maritime issues, see the author's International law and Iran's policy in the Caspian Sea: Shifting paradigms.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.

Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd.

 

Click here to comment
on this article



 

Get CC HeadlinesOn your Desk Top

 

Search Our Archive



Our Site

Web

Online Users