Iran’s increasingly draconian regime is continuing to throw down the gauntlet to not just Iranians who think recent elections were rigged, but to the world, almost daring critics within and outside to do something. Its latest seemingly provocative act: arresting 8 local employees of the British Embassy.
This has brought an immediate response from the European Union:
The European Union has demanded the immediate release of Iranian staff at Britain’s embassy in Tehran detained on Saturday over post-election unrest.
EU ministers meeting in Greece warned that “harassment or intimidation” of embassy staff would be met with a “strong and collective” response.
Iranian media reported that eight local staff at the UK mission had been held for their role in the recent riots.
UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband dismissed the allegations as baseless.
Relations between the countries are strained after President Ahmadinejad accused the UK of stoking post-election protests, which London denies.
Iran has repeatedly accused foreign powers – especially Britain and the US – of meddling after the 12 June election, which handed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a decisive victory.
In the fallout of the crisis, Tehran expelled two British diplomats in the past week, and the UK has responded with a similar measure.
Writes Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey:
Obviously, though, this is a rather transparent attempt to “prove” to Iranians that the protests that coalesced from their anger and disillusionment were nothing more than the manipulations of the West. Will that work? Possibly; the mullahs have sold variations of this for the last 30 years, and conspiracy theories hold a lot of power in that region. However, one of the reasons people supported reform candidates like Mirhossein Mousavi was because they have tired of international isolation and living in a pariah nation. As this forces the regime into further isolation, it only deepens the long-term rot in the support for the mullahcracy.
Morrissey is correct, of course: the Iranian regime has been trying to find a way from the outset to point to the demonstrators as tools of Washington or London, but diplomats and leaders in both countries are aware of this trap and have taken great pains (often at some domestic political cost) to not chomp on the bait. But this is not a device only used in Iran:
1. When I lived in New Delhi, India, as a student interning on The Hindustan Times newspaper, and later when I returned after journalism graduate school to write for The Chicago Daily News and other newspapers from there, the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and some parties on the left often talked about the CIA being seemingly everywhere. A common phrase was “a foreign hand” behind such and such. (Mrs. Gandhi later imposed a dictatorship-lite “state of emergency” for a while, but it was lifted and India today maintains its status as the World’s Biggest Democracy.)
2. When I lived in Spain, I arrived during the final months of Gen. Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, and became the Christian Science Monitor’s Special Correspondent (super stringer) in Madrid. I was brought into help the Newsweek bureau cover Franco’s last hurrah and was there when he gave his final public speech in his high-pitched voice before a massive crowd. He warned against the machinations of the Masonic conspiracy in Spain (until I later learned what THAT was all about I wondered if he would next blame Spain’s problems on the Elks, Rotary Club, Kiwanis Club and the Moose Lodge).
3. There are many other examples throughout history of leaders and governments whipping up anger and fear against outside forces to either gain support or misdirect attention from their own failings or reprehensible excesses. It’s a tactic used often (in the U.S. note the McCarthy era and compare what was alleged to what later history showed to be correct or overblown rhetoric).
What does all of this mean for the Obama administration? Obama has talked about opening a dialogue with Iran, but fiery, defiant, and downright scolding comments from its increasingly viewed-as-tainted leadership and its war of words — and now apparently arrests — with England are likely to throw a big, fat, political monkey wrench into his oft-stateds plans.
Or will it?
The Obama administration will leave open the door for discussions with Iran over its nuclear ambitions even as demonstrators question the legitimacy of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election, administration officials said Sunday.
The door could still be open — but Obama is likely to pay a bigger political price if talks take place now then if talks occurred before the images of a murdered young woman zipped across the world via the Internet and before Iranian officials clearly sought to escalate their defiance in not just words, and in the behavior of their security forces in dealings with Iranians and even foreign governments.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.