The capture of 15 British sailors on March 23, 2007, by Iranian troops could be a provoked incident, to underline Iran's new enemy status. Occurring the day before a crucial vote in the UN, its timing was definitely suspect. Earlier, Brzezinski had warned that a stage provocation might be engineered to invade Iran. But who is upstaging who? Could it be Iran took these sailors as bargaining chips to fence off an imminent threat of invasion?

In "Kabul, Baghdad ... Tehran?!", we reported that National Security Advisor and founding member of the Trilateral Commission Zbigniew Brzezinski tacitly warned a Senate Foreign Relations Committee about a staged provocation so that an invasion of Iran was "warranted". Brzezinski focused on the role of the US, but with the last remaining superpower closely monitored, could it be that instead the British Army decided to act? It is after all Britain that has a far longer "problem" with Iran than any American.

In July 2004, eight British sailors and marine commandos were seized after three patrol boats were said to have strayed into the Iranian side of the Shatt al-Arab waterway. The men were blindfolded, held for three days, and paraded on Iranian television. There were reports of a trial, which never materialised, before they were released.
A repeat performance occurred on March 23, 2007, when 15 British sailors and marines were seized by the Iranian navy in a channel separating Iraq and Iran. Iran states they had ventured into Iranian waters, whereas the British claimed they had stayed within Iraqi waters. As the border in the area is largely unmarked, it is the perfect location to create an incident. At first, it seems that Britain thought that the problem would disappear after a few days, and a repeated of the 2004 scenario was to be expected.
Hence, in the early hours after the event, Commodore Lambert said he hoped the incident was the result of a misunderstanding. "There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that they were in Iraqi territorial waters." Remarkably, he then added: "Equally, the Iranians may well claim that they were in Iranian territorial waters." To add: "The extent and definition of territorial waters in this part of the world is very complicated. We may find, and I hope we will find, that this is a simple misunderstanding at a tactical level."
The British patrol was officially conducting a routine search of traffic in the Shatt al-Arab waterway when it was surrounded by Iranian vessels and detained. Margaret Beckett, the British foreign secretary, said that the British patrol had been inside Iraqi waters "in support of the government of Iraq to stop smuggling" and that the Iranian envoy "was left in no doubt that we want them back". On the other side of the stand-off, Iran accused the British government of entering their waters "in a suspicious act", arguing Britain should not shift the blame on the Iranians for the British transgression.

Immediately, there was a complication, which Britain seemed not have taken into the calculation. The timing of the incident was highly "coincidental", occurring the day before the UN security council was due to vote on new sanctions against Iran over its refusal to halt uranium enrichment for its nuclear programme. The sanctions to be voted on represented only a very tentative extension of measures passed in December 2006, which Iran ignored.
At the same time, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who had been due to address the council before the vote, cancelled his trip at the very last minute. A spokesman for the Iranian foreign ministry, Mohammed Ali Hosseini, told Iranian state television it was because of "America's obstruction in issuing visas". Meanwhile in Washington, the State Department insisted it had issued 75 visas for Ahmadinejad's delegation, including air crew and support staff in time.

With the news of the captured sailors fresh on everyone's front page, the UN council unanimously agreed to widen sanctions against Iran. The new sanctions block Iranian arms exports and freeze assets of many involved in nuclear and missile work. Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said "pressure and intimidation" would not change Tehran's policy, which it says is for entirely peaceful purposes. Mottaki said Iran was not acting as an aggressor over the issue. "The Security Council's decision to try to coerce Iran into suspension of its peaceful nuclear programme is a gross violation" of the UN Charter.
Remarkably, it was British ambassador to the UN Emyr Jones Parry who made a statement on behalf of the Council. "We deplore Iran's failure to comply with the earlier resolutions of the Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency and we call upon Iran once again to comply fully with all its international obligations. [...] This resolution sends an unambiguous signal to the government and people of Iran... that the path of nuclear proliferation by Iran is not one that the international community can accept." Still, many countries, while supporting the resolution against Iran, warned of serious consequences given the already volatile situation in the region. Iran was given sixty days to comply with the resolution and suspend the uranium enrichment programme.

In the Western media, with Britain claiming their troops were "well within" Iraqi waters, the seizure was interpreted as an act of Iranian provocation. Newspapers reported this was Tehran "flexing their muscles" and that irrelevant of the outcome of the UN security council vote, "there is no sign the Iranians will bow to international pressure and surrender the right to enrich uranium." Similar wording, of course, was heard in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, when it was claimed that Saddam Hussein was unwilling to co-operate with the weapon inspections. It paved the way for the Iraq invasion.

Newspapers also reported that "Iran increasingly appears to be the quartermaster and banker behind the Shia militias keeping British troops pinned down in southern Iraq. In Lebanon, Iran's client Hizbullah holds the key to war or peace, and Tehran is also now a player in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a sponsor of Hamas."
Despite this propaganda, on that same day, newspapers had to report that "US and UK fail to find smoking gun". Ian Black, Middle East editor of "the Guardian", wrote that "although British and US military and diplomats often complain of Iranian support for insurgents in Iraq, there is no 'smoking gun' to prove it." This admission came from Lt Col Justin Maciejewski on the day that the British sailors were seized, who said he could not prove Iranian interference in Basra, where UK troops come under regular mortar and rocket attack. Instead, he relied on gossip, stating that community leaders had told him Iranian agents were paying Iraqis $500 a month to carry out attacks. "All the information we are getting from the locals ... is that the vast majority of the violence against us is inspired from outside of Iraq and the people here very much believe that that is Iran," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "There is nothing I have seen that would disprove what they are telling me." In the War on Terror, gossip and hearsay have obviously been upgraded to the status of "firm evidence" and real evidence - which the troops cannot uncover - falls in the category of things that would not disprove "what they are telling me".
Meanwhile, the US Central Command claims there are 150 Iranian agents in Iraq, though state they are impossible to confirm their statement. "There are very few Iranian nationals in Iraq, or at least very few carrying Iranian documents," one diplomat said. "But they have so much influence on the ground, they are able to operate effectively at arm's length." In short: we don't know who they are, we can't provide evidence how many there are, we can't find them, but we know they are there and very dangerous.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of these statements can be traced back to an Iranian opposition movement, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which claims Tehran pays 31,690 Iraqis under Al Quds command. Most are affiliated with the Badr Brigade of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which has been accused of operating death squads targeting Sunni Muslims. Their identification of Iranian moles that are responsible for all the terrorism is therefore more than likely a detraction, so that their own role in the mass killings is not confirmed.
Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, claimed accusations that Tehran is arming insurgents were an attempt to find a scapegoat for US "defeats and failures". Experts such as Toby Dodge of Queen Mary College, London states that "I don't doubt that the Iranians do have very great influence in Iraq, but they are not manipulating everything behind the scenes. They can keep the pot boiling, and raise or lower the temperature, but they don't create things."

In the REAL NEWSpaper, March 25, 2007 edition, we asked whether Iran was slowly being set up as a new superpower and whether a short-term invasion might be deemed to be less "beneficiary" than promoting Iran to the role of a new super enemy. If that were to become the preferred option, it are the US and Great Britain that have made sure Iran can be promoted as a new super enemy, as well as becoming one - despite its obvious lack of nuclear weapons, even nuclear power. The War on Terror removed the Taliban, Iran's enemy to the east, and then eliminated Saddam Hussein. In little more than a year, Iran became the dominant power in the Gulf and the Middle East.
"Getting rid of the Taliban and then getting rid of Saddam, basically gave Iran a free ride in the region," states Mamoun Fandy, senior fellow for Gulf security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "With the collapse of the Iraqi state, the whole balance of power in the Gulf went out of control, and we moved away from a world of nation states to the world of sectarianism, with Saudi Arabia viewing itself as the centre of gravity of Sunni Islam and by default, Iran became the centre of gravity for Shia Islam."
And to make sure everyone knows this, both the US and Great Britain are egging it on. That worsening sectarian divide has given Iran more influence in Arab states with Shiite majorities or significant minorities with a history of subjugation to Sunni rulers: in Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. However, that influence in the Arab world transcends the politics of religious identity. For radical Arab Muslims, Tehran is a bastion of defiance to US and British ambitions, and the Iranian nuclear programme is a source of pride.

The seizure of the 15 sailors can thus be seen as a staged border provocation from both sides - take your pick!
If this was British provocation, the immediate purpose would have been to put Iran under more pressure during the UN vote. In one scenario, Iran might be seen as an aggressor and more leverage could be applied on Russia to agree with more stringent sanctions. Iran would then either have to accept, causing great embarrassment to their political leaders and their standing in the region; a refusal to comply might provide a pretext for an attack or an invasion and would cement Iran's image as an emerging super enemy.
Iran may have entered Iraqi waters as an act of defiance for the UN nuclear vote. Or Iranian troops may have acted without the authorisation of the Iranian leaders, in an effort to embarrass their own regime, which like any nation, has its allies and its enemies within.

The War on Terror has largely been seen as a US expansionist drive, ratified by 9/11. The role of Britain, i.e. Prime Minister Tony Blair, is often distorted to that of a man who does not want to endanger his special relationship with the US and consents to any decision Bush makes. But in truth, Blair is a careful manipulator and was able to cajole Bush into adopting a UN-led approach to Iraq, until various neo-conservatives in his Administration went against Blair and Colin Powell and opted for a unilateral invasion of Iraq. Blair had no qualms with that.
Though many Americans will remember the Iranian hostage crisis of 1980, it is Britain who has an almost demonic image in Iran, dating back to the MI6-backed coup against the nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and years of British support for the shah, especially in the volatile period before and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. In the Khomeini era, the hostility was encapsulated in the renaming of the road outside the British embassy in Tehran as "Bobby Sands Avenue" after the IRA hunger striker, who to Iranians symbolised resistance to colonial rule. When it was clear that Libya was behind the Lockerbie bombing, according to former MI5 official David Shayler, MI6 briefed the media, arguing it was in truth Iran that was behind the attack. British relatives of the Lockerbie dead were continuously lied to, whereas American citizens were told the truth.
There was also the long crisis over Salman Rushdie, whose novel "The Satanic Verses" triggered an Iranian fatwa, permitting him to be killed as an apostate. The author had to live under special branch guard until 1998, when liberalisation in Tehran and the efforts of the late foreign secretary, Robin Cook, brought a negotiated end to the affair.
No wonder therefore that Iranian rhetoric still portrays Britain as the "little Satan" - though a global track record means the distinction of the "Great Satan" goes to the United States.

After the seizure of the sailors, there were briefings, allegedly from inside Iran, that the sailors were captured intentionally, to be used as bargaining chips for the release of five Iranians who were arrested at the Iranian consul in Irbil, Iraq by US troops.
Another "senior Iranian military official" allegedly said that the decision to capture the soldiers was made during a March 18 emergency meeting of the High Council for Security, following a report by the Al Quds contingent commander, Kassem Suleimani, to the Iranian chief of the armed forces, Maj.Gen. Hassan Firouz Abadi. In the report, according to Asharq al-Awsat, Suleimani warned Abadi that Al Quds and Revolutionary Guards' operations in Iraq had become transparent to US and British intelligence following the arrest of a senior Al Quds officer and four of his deputies in Irbil. It is with the latter statement that we should seriously distrust the genuine nature of this statement.

The Iranian press agency Fars stated that navigational equipment on the seized British boats "show that they (sailors) were aware that they were operating in Iranian waters and Iranian border gurads fulfilled their responsibility." Tony Blair countered, arguing that satellite data proved that they were 1.7 nautical miles inside Iraqi waters when they were seized.
With their seizure taking much longer than the three day incident of 2004, Blair warned of a "different phase" if diplomatic efforts fail to secure the imminent release of the service personnel. Asked what he meant, Blair added: "Well, we will just have to see, but what they should understand is that we cannot have a situation where our servicemen and women are seized when actually they are in Iraqi waters under a UN mandate, patrolling perfectly rightly and in accordance with that mandate, and then effectively captured and taken to Iran." Should we imply that Blair was insinuating that he was considering using force, if not an attack against Iran? In which case we could have indeed yet another in a long line of staged border incidents, to get a country into war.

That this was a staged border incident to provide a pretext for an Iranian attack was underlined by Craig Murray, who was a previous head of Foreign Office's maritime section, carrying out negotiations on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. "In international law the Iranian government were not out of order in detaining foreign military personnel in waters to which they have a legitimate claim," Murray said. "For the Royal Navy, to be interdicting shipping within the twelve mile limit of territorial seas in a region they know full well is subject to maritime boundary dispute, is unnecessarily provocative." The former envoy said that this was "especially true as apparently they were not looking for weapons but for smuggled vehicles attempting to evade car duty." "What has the evasion of Iranian or Iraqi taxes go to do with the Royal Navy?" The answer seems to be: very little. But perhaps tax evasion may indeed be the spark that sets off the Iran invasion, which is what Bush and specifically Blair seem to have wanted for a very long time.
When Britain published a map of the Iraq-Iran border and the position of the sailors, it mocked Iranian diplomats for first locating the British boats within Iraqi waters, only to then change the location where the incident had occurred. The British government thus tried to claim it had caught Iran red-handed in its inventions, and that Britain was correct. But Murray claimed that "the British Government has published a map showing the coordinates of the incident, well within an Iran/Iraq maritime border. The mainstream media and even the blogosphere has bought this hook, line and sinker. But there are two colossal problems. A) The Iran/Iraq maritime boundary shown on the British government map does not exist. It has been drawn up by the British Government. Only Iraq and Iran can agree their bilateral boundary, and they never have done this in the Gulf, only inside the Shatt because there it is the land border too. This published boundary is a fake with no legal force. B) Accepting the British coordinates for the position of both HMS Cornwall and the incident, both were closer to Iranian land than Iraqi land. Go on, print out the map and measure it. Which underlines the point that the British produced border is not a reliable one."

It is however also possible that the seizure of the British soldiers was indeed a calculated act by the Iranian government, for one simple reason: it occurred days before US troops that had gathered in the Persian Gulf began "training runs", flying pretend attacks against Iran - only to abandon the mission shortly before entering Iranian airspace. If the Iranians somehow would react to these "training exercises", a diplomatic incident could be the outcome - perhaps desired by the Bush Administration as it would provide their pretext for an outright invasion.
There were also reports from within Russia that the US had set a date for an attack on Iran: April 6 - Good Friday. The story of the US attack was written by the Russian journalist Andrei Uglanov in the Moscow weekly "Argumenty Nedeli". Uglanov wrote that the attack is slated to last for twelve hours, lasting from 4 AM until 4 PM local time. Friday is a holiday in Iran and April 6 is of course Good Friday. In the course of the attack, code named Operation Bite, about 20 targets are marked for bombing; the list includes uranium enrichment facilities, research centers, and laboratories.
Asked by RIA-Novosti to comment on the Uglanov report, retired Colonel General Leonid Ivashov confirmed its essential features in a March 21 interview: "I have no doubt that there will be an operation, or more precisely a violent action against Iran." Ivashov, who has reportedly served at various times as an informal advisor to Putin, is currently the Vice President of the Moscow Academy for Geopolitical Sciences.

Is it possible that the Iranian government decided to seize these soldiers in the hope that Britain would not aid the US in its attacks while the Iranian government was holding British soldiers? It is a well-tested technique, seen in previous wars. Meanwhile, it is clear that with Britain unwilling to "negotiate", whoever was the aggressor, the possibility of an Iranian attack, predicted for March-April 2007 (see for example our sample issue of the REAL NEWSpaper, February 2, 2007), is bang on schedule.