Vol. 71/No. 15      April 16, 2007

Tehran said it captured the British military personnel in Iranian waters, while London insists they were in Iraqi territory.

The standoff over the detainees was intertwined with the imperialist campaign against Iran, led by Washington, London, and their allies, over Tehran’s aspirations to develop its own nuclear energy industry and Iranian influence in Iraq. This has included two rounds of sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council, the assassination of a key Iranian nuclear scientist by the Israeli secret police Mossad, and the arrest by U.S. forces in Iraq of five Iranian citizens. Blair and U.S. president George Bush had publicly ruled out an exchange of the five Iranians for the 15 British troops.

A March 30 meeting of European Union foreign ministers in Bremen, Germany, warned of “appropriate measures” if the British troops were not released. Bush said March 31 he “strongly” supported London. The United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution expressing “grave concern at the capture” of the 15.

An Iranian diplomat kidnapped February 4 in Baghdad was released yesterday. According to the Associated Press, “The Iraqi government is intensively seeking the release of five Iranians detained by U.S. forces in Iraq in January… . Securing the Iranians’ release will help to get the detained Britons freed.”  
 
Botched U.S. kidnapping attempt
The Independent published an article yesterday pointing to what may have triggered the crisis. “A failed American attempt to abduct two senior Iranian security officers on an official visit to northern Iraq was the starting pistol for a crisis that 10 weeks later led to Iranians seizing 15 British sailors and Marines,” it said.

It reported that the operation took place January 11—shortly after Bush’s speech announcing the U.S. escalation of its war in Iraq—in Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan. Helicopter-borne U.S. forces conducted a surprise raid on a long-established Iranian liaison office there, capturing five junior Iranian officials who Washington then accused of being spies. U.S. authorities are still holding them.

According to the Independent, the U.S. raid’s real aim, which was botched, was to arrest Mohammed Jafari, deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and Gen. Minojahar Frouzanda, chief of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The two were in Kurdistan on an official visit during which they met Iraqi president Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government.

“The objective of the Americans was to arrest Iranian security officials who had gone to Iraq to develop cooperation in the area of bilateral security,” Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki told the Iranian News Agency at the time.

Meanwhile, Reuters reported that protests have taken place in Iran against London. Some 60,000 soccer fans reportedly chanted “Death to England!” at a March 30 football game in Tehran.  
 
British capitalist parties back Blair
As leaders of the Conservative, Liberal Democrat, and Scottish National parties—the main British opposition parties to the governing Labour Party—expressed their backing for the government, a discussion unfolded among capitalist politicians and in the media over what to do.

Conservative Party shadow foreign secretary William Hague called for “quiet diplomacy.”

A March 27 editorial in the Financial Times argued that the “plight of the British naval personnel is unlikely to lead directly to conflict. But it is part of a pattern of escalating tensions that looks dangerous… . It is up to Iran, above all, to take a step back and calm the situation.”

An editorial in the March 31 Daily Telegraph called for sanctions, seizing of Iranian assets, and launching “tactical strikes at Iranian military installations.” There are thousands of British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the paper pointed out.  
 
The British fleet’s ‘battlefield’
London also has a sizeable naval presence, having doubled its commitment in the Arab-Persian Gulf recently, according to Royal Navy Commodore Keith Winstanley. The British fleet operates as part of the U.S.-led coalition maritime command, whose 45 vessels from 19 countries engage in what are called “routine patrols” against “smuggling.” The British Ministry of Defence says its forces and allied troops in the northern Gulf forcibly boarded ships 66 times in March.

In an interview before the sailors and marines were captured, Winstanley, who functions as deputy commander of the imperialist naval operations in the area, said, “There is no doubt that we could use the war-fighting capabilities” of the British fleet. The British navy refers to the area from the southern coast of Pakistan to the east coast of Africa as “battle-space.”

Others, however, cautioned against any military attack. “Military action is unfeasible without American support” wrote the Daily Telegraph’s defense correspondent, Thomas Harding, “and so is a military blockade of the Gulf.”
 
 
Related articles:
Senate: $98 billion for Iraq, Afghanistan wars
$5 billion more than Bush requested;
Democrats try to salvage ‘antiwar’ posture  
 
 
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