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.
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