British on tightrope over captives in Iran

Britain is urging international allies to join it in suspending official business with Iran in a bid to increase pressure on Tehran to release a group of sailors seized a week ago.

The standoff over the 15 naval personnel captured in the Persian Gulf last Friday is threatening to degenerate into the gravest bilateral dispute since the Salman Rushdie affair. Indeed, escalating demands by Iran and Britain alike are making a trouble-free exit appear less likely for either side.

"There is no easy way out of this," says Mohammad Hadi Semati, an expert at the University of Tehran. "One side has to lose face. Which side? I don't know."

Britain has already announced that all official business with Iran has been suspended, including visits, visas, and support for trade missions. It took its case to the UN Thursday, asking the Security Council to "deplore" Iranian actions. The UN was expected to sign off on the statement Thursday. Iran, meanwhile, suspended a promised release of a female British sailor and insisted that Britain admit it was in Iranian waters.

"They [the British] are now in the region in which, with the excuse of controlling ships that go to Iraq, they want to make it a norm to violate other countries' sovereignty," the head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, said Thursday. "But they should know that the cost of this is not cheap."

Analysts warn that a more aggressive stance towards Tehran – a total visa ban, for example, or an asset freeze or trade sanctions – could be counterproductive.

"No one is going to rush into any other punitive measures," says Alex Bigham, an Iran expert at the Foreign Policy Centre, a London think-tank with ties to the Labour Party. "Further down the line, you'd look at suspending all relations.... But there's no great appetite to do that in the short term."

Britain believes that it can get the EU to signal strong support at a foreign ministers meeting Friday. EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana has already told the Iranians that the EU viewed the detention of the sailors as unacceptable.

"The overall game plan is to encourage the EU countries to consider what we've done, suspending business with Iranian government," says a Foreign Office official, on condition of anonymity.

Analysts are not sure if all European countries will be eager to impair their ties with Iran. "The British are already trying to bring the Europeans on board, and they may or may not be successful," says George Joffe, a Middle East expert at the Centre for International Studies at Cambridge University. "The Europeans may say enough is enough, it's your own fault. After all, Britain has offended the Iranians by leading the demand for sanctions."

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