Adrian Hamilton: Ratcheting up the Iran conflict is the wrong tactic

It's, on the whole, not a good idea for ministers to rush back to London in an air of dramatic crisis. Prime ministers, perhaps. Tony Blair has been attacked more than once for failing to cut short a holiday when events back home demanded his attention. But ministers?

Margaret Beckett's return from Turkey to address the Commons yesterday was completely unnecessary. The talks, or non-talks, with the Iranians are unlikely to be affected one way or another. All she did was to bring on a classic bit of Iranian teasing, when Tehran showed pictures of healthy British captives eating good Persian fare, along with the promise of the early release of the sole female marine.

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Mrs Beckett's return was really just a political gesture, made to keep the populist press at bay and to give added emphasis to Tony Blair's dour warning this week that the crisis with Iran was moving to "another phase". By which he presumably meant a step escalation in the confrontation by giving co-ordinates to prove that the British boats were in Iraqi waters and demonstrating British anger by freezing diplomatic relations.

Fair enough. Britain does have a strong case in international law to argue both that it was operating in Iraqi waters and that the Iranian response contravened every international convention. But that is not really what it is all about, or at any rate what it is in danger of becoming. Context is all in international relations, and the context in this case has become positively explosive.

Obsessed with the idea that Iran is fuelling and co-ordinating resistance in Iraq, the US has raised the temperature by seizing five Iranian nationals in the northern city of Erbil. The British, meanwhile, have now openly accused Iran of not only exporting sophisticated bombs to Iraq (a claim disputed by some experts), but also paying insurgents to attack British troops.

The incident in the Gulf comes as the British have taken over the lead role in patrolling the coastal waters and conduct stop-and-search of commercial shipping, ostensibly to prevent smuggling of goods. When the UK servicemen were taken, they were returning in small vessels from just such a search of a cargo vessel. Given the background, and the speed at which the UK inflatables were surrounded by Iranian revolutionary guard vessels, it seems unlikely that it was a pure accident.

But that doesn't really tell you whether the British were taken as a deliberate provocation, a gesture of defiance at US-UK attempts to control the Gulf waterways or as a bargaining chip to use to get the Iranians taken in Kurdistan freed. Nor does it tell you whether the seizure was planned or sanctioned by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, with the knowledge of the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

What we do know is that there are considerable tensions within the Tehran government, brought on partly by the failure of the government of Ahmadinejad to deliver the economic benefits he'd been elected to provide and partly because of the criticism of Iranian diplomats and politicians, who fear the president is leading them into an unnecessary and damaging confrontation with the West.

The trouble is that the more pressure that there is from the inside, the more seductive it is for the regime to encourage confrontation abroad as a means of solidifying support at home. The seizure of British sailors may or may not be a tactic in this politics, but it may well be becoming one now. The quandary for the British government is how to adopt a robust response to what is an international outrage, and yet not fall into the trap of playing the Revolutionary Guards' game on their terms. We need to encourage the forces of common sense in Iran not marginalise them by overreaction.

So far, it has to be said, we and the Americans have done our best to fire the confrontational elements in Tehran and to embarrass the forces of moderation. Over the nuclear issue, as over the question of alleged Iranian interference in Iraq, we have kept using the language of confrontation. Even yesterday, in a relatively downbeat statement, the Foreign Secretary was talking of "our demands" and Iran's failure to meet them.

There is another way. It is the way we seemed to be following until Mrs Beckett took her flight from Ankara. It is to quietly, but emphatically, assert our rights, in international courts if necessary, but to look to the Iraqi Government and the countries of the Gulf to bring Iran to a sensible resolution of the affair. The more we trumpet our determination at home, the more we make it difficult for our friends abroad. Keep cool and build your alliances is a wise tactic in international relations, as it is in domestic politics.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk

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