Britain has few options with Iran

British diplomats have had several options at their disposal to resolve the 12-day standoff with Iran over the capture of 15 sailors and marines. The only problem is that most of them are fraught with perils of their own.

It is a measure of how low Britain’s spirits have fallen over the incident that the image of Maj. Gen. Charles Gordon, who was killed and beheaded with his men in Khartoum, Sudan, in 1885 before a British relief force could rescue him, is being invoked this week in London as a symbol of the once-great Britannia’s “humiliation” in Iran.

“Toothless Britain Takes It Lion Down,” the Daily Mirror complained Monday. “Sick Mullahs Humiliate Troops,” wailed the Sun.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has no easy military options, most analysts agree, and even his choices for diplomacy are few. He has elected to pursue a two-track approach: intense multilateral diplomacy with partners as disparate as Turkey, Iraq and Syria, and an unspecified threat that could include Europe-wide sanctions if diplomacy fails.

But there appear to be at least two red lines in British diplomacy, analysts said: no high-level, official apology, and no deals for releasing the detainees, despite the coincidence of this week’s release of an Iranian diplomat held in Iraq.

“The Iranians are always calling for apologies, going back into history; it’s been a kind of classic diplomatic ploy of theirs. And clearly, Britain’s red line is it’s not going to apologize for going into Iranian waters, because as they said, it’s self-evident that they didn’t,” said Alex Bigham of the London-based Foreign Policy Center.

The intense diplomacy comes as much of the British public has grown disheartened with the repeated television images of the detainees making public “confessions” of trespass into Iranian waters.

Britain insists the two patrol boats were operating legally in Iraqi territory in the Persian Gulf, where they were inspecting merchant ships for contraband before being seized March 23 by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

With Monday’s observances of the 25th anniversary of Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands, and Britain’s swift, violent and ultimately successful repulse, there have been inevitable comparisons to what then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would have done.

“There was a time when British citizenship afforded a degree of protection from foreign harassment,” the Daily Telegraph wrote, recalling the 13,000 British and Indian troops dispatched in 1868 “when the half-mad King of Abyssinia interned two of our diplomats.” An attack on one British subject’s property in Greece led to a Royal Navy blockade of Piraeus in 1850, the Telegraph also noted.

“A British subject, in whatever land he may be,” Foreign Secretary Lord Henry Temple Palmerston said at the time, “shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him from injustice and wrong.”

“If the Iranians hate us,” the Telegraph entreated, “let them also fear us.”

But Britain already is oversubscribed in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is hardly in a position to start a new war, and a surgical rescue mission is infeasible, with government officials saying they do not know where the detainees are being held.

Moreover, isolating Iran appeared unlikely last week when Britain failed to persuade some members of the United Nations Security Council to issue a condemnation or affirm that Britain’s forces had been operating legally in Iraqi waters.

That leaves diplomacy that the British have described as tough, patient and possibly lengthy.

“All the way through, we’ve had two tracks on this,” Blair said Tuesday. “One is to make sure that Iran understands that the pressure is there available to us, if this thing has to be hard and tough and long, but on the other hand to say all the way through that we’re not looking for a confrontation over this, and actually the most important thing is to get the people back safe and sound, and if they want to resolve this in a diplomatic way, then the door is open.”

Former Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind, now a Conservative member of Parliament, said that Britain’s options are few.

“Basically, it is distressing, it is frustrating, but you have to bite your lip and just treat it diplomatically, and at the same time prepare a Plan B in case diplomatic options don’t work.... But it’s foolish to use rhetoric to imply you can somehow extract them by unsubstantiated threats. You have to simply realize that your options are limited,” Rifkind said.

One of the key difficulties in resolving the crisis has been confusion over who in Iran authorized the capture and why. Was it simply a police action against a perceived border incursion, as the Iranians insist? Was it authorized by the highest levels of the government, perhaps as a bargaining chip for Iranians being held under U.S. authorization in Iraq? Was it a unilateral move by the Revolutionary Guard to try to win political points by taunting the West?

In the early days of the crisis, there was serious uncertainty about whether Iran’s Foreign Ministry even knew where the hostages were, making it difficult for British officials to know with whom to conduct diplomacy.

Since then it has become clear that Iranian officials are most concerned about the role of the Revolutionary Guard as a guarantor of security in the Persian Gulf, and their perceptions that the British military has been challenging that role, said Rosemary Hollis, director of research and a Middle East expert at Chatham House.

“In that context, the Iranians would expect the British to be pushing their luck in the headwaters of the gulf. That they would want to be carrying on some spying, and so on,” Hollis said.

But that, she said, makes a diplomatic solution “easier,” since Iran’s national security council chief, Ali Larijani, on Monday night outlined a potential path for easing Iran’s concerns: forming a delegation to discuss future military operations in the region.

“They want naval officers to come, they want to discuss how are they going to coexist in these complicated waters of the Persian Gulf, and will they concede that they could be trampling on Iranian sovereignty, and in the process, back off, basically?” Hollis said.

Crucial to the success of any diplomatic endeavor, analysts say, is what threats may be contained in “Plan B.”

British officials in private briefings sought to diminish any hint of military action as part of the “hard and tough and long” process mentioned by Blair. But they have deliberately not said what they do mean.

“If part of your position is to make a threat as to what will happen if ... your demands are not realized, it’s much more likely to work if that threat is made privately,” Rifkind said. “If you make public threats, that obviously escalates the crisis and makes it more difficult for them to back down.”

The Daily Telegraph proposed a menu of options, starting with sanctions and seizing of Iranian assets, graduating to sponsorship of opponents of the Iranian government, then tactical strikes on Iranian military installations and, “in extremis,” an “armed siege, complete with no-fly zone” similar to that once imposed on Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

“Limiting ourselves to trivial resolutions will be treated by the ayatollahs as a sign of weakness,” the paper warned.

But among most analysts here, the sense was that there was more persuasion than threat in Britain’s diplomacy.

Said Hollis: “You don’t ask the Syrians for help if you’re playing hardball in private.”

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kim.murphy@latimes.com