British-Iranian dispute enmeshed in tangled history

Other analysts seem to agree that the capture was planned in advance. Frances Harrison, the BBC correspondent in Iran, links the arrests to what she calls an "unusually aggressive speech" last week by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

[Khamenei] said: "In case the enemies of Iran intend to use force and violence and act illegally, without a doubt the Iranian nation and officials will use all their capabilities to strike the invading enemies."

It was an oddly defiant and hostile tone to strike for a new year speech.

One commentator, Sayeed Laylaz, has drawn a parallel with President George W Bush's state of the nation address in January, which was followed immediately by a US attack on an Iranian office in Irbil in northern Iraq and the seizure of five Iranians who are still being held by the US. ...

Mr Laylaz points out that the speech of Mr Khamenei was swiftly followed by the capture of the British sailors.

Some draw a more explicit link to the January raid in Irbil. Richard Beeston, the diplomatic editor of The Times of London, writes in an analysis that "privately there is acknowledgement that [the British sailors'] fate is bound closely to that of the Iranian captives" seized by the US.

Iranian officials speculated that the way to win the freedom of their comrades was to capture American or British soldiers and arrange a prisoner swap. Reza Faker, a writer for the Revolutionary Guards' newspaper Subhi Sadek, said: "We have the ability to capture a nice bunch of blue-eyed blond-haired officers and feed them to our fighting cocks." Reza Zakeri, of President Ahmadinejad's office, said that capturing a Western soldier was easier than acquiring a cheaply made Chinese product.

Many analyses contrast the current crisis with a 2004 incident in which Iranians arrested eight British servicemen on patrol in disputed waters between Iran and Iraq. Those servicemen were released three days later, after making a televised apology for straying into Iran. Writing in the The Scotsman, an Edinburgh daily, Dr. Ali Ansari, the director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at St. Andrews university, says that the diplomatic landscape is more sensitive today.

Because this incident occurred on the eve of a crunch meeting at the UN to call Iran to account over its nuclear programme, tensions are much higher than in 2004.

We are also dealing with an entirely different regime from the previous one under president Khatami, who favoured conciliation over confrontation.

In contrast, president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has clashed repeatedly with western governments over his refusal to cooperate with inspectors over his nuclear programme.

For all the possible political motives however, the main cause of the showdown could be a centuries-old dispute over the water border between Iran and Iraq. It began with the 1639 Treaty of Zuhab between the Persian and Ottoman empires, which divided the land without a careful survey. Disagreements through the 1980s, and some of the fiercest fighting in the eight-year war between the two nations occurred along this border. The Associated Press quotes Lawrence G. Potter, an associate professor of international affairs at Columbia University, who says that even to this day the exact demarcation has not been established. "The problem is that nobody knows where the border is," Potter said. "The British might have thought they were on their side, the Iranians might have thought they were on their side."

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