Diplomacy trumps machismo

What should the US do about Iran? Britain's successful effort to free its 15 marines offers useful lessons.

from the April 11, 2007 edition

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The sole woman among them was tricked into believing the men had been released. They said they were told to admit they were captured in Iranian waters, after which they would be repatriated. If they did not do so, they were told, they would face several years in an Iranian jail.

I am sure while all this was going on, Britain's Special Air Service soldiers stationed near Hereford, England, veterans of many derring-do missions that may never be told, were raring to mount a rescue operation. It would have been a tough one, as Americans found out in their costly, failed helicopter mission years before to rescue their comrades held hostage in the US embassy. But though British Prime Minister Tony Blair warned darkly of other measures if diplomacy failed, diplomacy it was, perhaps with sticks and carrots unknown to us, that the British employed to bring home their men and one woman.

In Washington, Britain's handling of the situation was closely watched, and has not ended the debate within the Bush administration of how best to get Iran to mend its unconscionable ways.

Though President Bush prudently says that everything is on the table, military force cannot seriously be under consideration. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who has brought realism and good sense to the Pentagon, says it is not.

The US military is strained to its limits in Iraq. A fair amount of goodwill toward the US among young Iranians would turn instantly to antiAmerican fervor if America bombed or invaded. And if the postwar occupation of Iraq has been messy, it could be a nightmare in Iran. It is doubtful that the American public would have the stomach for it.

So diplomacy, and multilateral pressure through the European Union and the United Nations, remains the Bush administration's course. Diplomacy can be firm, and the US should continue its campaign to thwart Iran's quest for nuclear weapons (a quest that Tehran, of course, denies).

If it is not yet already abundantly clear to Mr. Ahmadinejad, who sometimes lives in a world of make-believe, the Iranian leadership should be left in no doubt about the awesome consequences of an Iranian-developed nuclear weapon being used by them or their surrogates against the United States or its allies.

Whether Iran's capture of the British servicemen was carefully planned as a Machiavellian taunting of the West or was just one of those spontaneous incidents that sometimes propels surprised nations into confrontation, a shooting war was avoided. While Iran's leadership often seems mysterious and its actions unfathomable, diplomacy can sometimes trump machismo.

• John Hughes, a former editor of the Monitor, is currently a professor of communications at Brigham Young University.

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