Face-off with Iran takes tougher turn
Tehran spurned UN Security Council sanctions Sunday as it still held 15 British captives.
from the March 26, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 4
That warning has been echoed by senior military officers. The British sailors were detained – British officials say "kidnapped" – less than two days later.
"The captured British sailors are under interrogation and admitted ... that they have transgressed Iranian territorial waters," said Army Gen. Ali Reza Afshar, Iran's deputy chief of staff.
"The United States and its allies know that if they make any mistake in their calculations ... they will not be able to control the dimensions and limit the duration of a war," said General Afshar.
Other reporting indicated that the Britons may have been picked up to be used as bargaining chips for the release of five Iranians detained in January by US forces in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil.
Iran claims they were "diplomats" who were "kidnapped" from an official Iranian consulate. The US alleges that the men were Revolutionary Guard operatives, caught with a "treasure trove" of intelligence and flushing documents down the toilet.
The London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper, quoting what it called a source close to Iran Al Qods Brigade – an elite unit of the Revolutionary Guard Corps that the US accuses of targeting Americans in Iraq – reported over the weekend that the arrest of the Iranians had compromised Al Qods operations in Iraq.
"The decision to detain the Britons was made at an emergency meeting of the Supreme Defense [Security] Council for the purpose of bargaining for the release of the Revolutionary Guard and intelligence officers being held by the Americans in Iraq," the pan-Arab newspaper quoted the source as saying.
This dynamic points to a broader strategic game at play in New York, Iran, and Iraq, analysts say.
"The issue is much more than the nuclear program [and] in recent months that has become clearer, as the Americans have started explicitly linking Iran with destabilizing Iraq, and putting a carrier task force into the Gulf, to reassure its allies and have more leverage on Iran," says Shahram Chubin, an Iran specialist at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.
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