Angry regime accusations of provocative meddling by Britain, the US, and Europe in Iran’s post-election upheaval have been crisply batted away by foreign secretary David Miliband and other western politicians. But the daily torrent of allegations is straining already rocky relations with Tehran and could have a lasting, deleterious impact in a range of key policy areas – principally on future efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
A seemingly orchestrated campaign to blame Iran’s troubles on the west is now in full swing and it is as yet uncertain how far the regime is prepared to go. British and European ambassadors have been repeatedly carpeted by the foreign ministry. BBC broadcasts have been jammed and its resident correspondent expelled. And in an unsubtle attempt to deflect attention from himself, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad personally warned Gordon Brown and Barack Obama to ”correct your interfering stances”.
Following the cue given by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Friday, when he described Britain as the ”most evil” of Iran’s foreign foes, pro-government media have escalated their attacks. ”Brown is one of the most inefficient politicians of England who has witnessed cases of financial corruption in his cabinet … and has moved towards collapse and destruction,” said the Siyasat-e-Ruz newspaper. ”He is trying to interfere in other countries’ domestic affairs in order to hide his failures.”
According to the BBC’s monitoring service, Iranian al-Alam television has been continually broadcasting ”confessions” by two alleged members of the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, also known as the People’s Mojahedin of Iran, a US-designated terrorist group opposed to the regime. Al-Alam claimed the two had admitted receiving instructions from the group’s ”operations room in Britain” that included incitement of demonstrators and ”sabotage attacks inside Iran”. Other channels have carried similar reports.
Raising this witch-hunt to a new heights of fantasy, Iran’s security forces are now claiming that unknown ”terrorists” and ”vandals”, rather than they themselves, were responsible for shooting and killing demonstrators in Tehran on Saturday. With relatively independent figures such as Ali Larijani, speaker of the Majlis (parliament), giving credence to talk of foreign plots, and with the Majlis’s foreign policy commission calling for a review of diplomatic ties with Britain, it’s possible on current trends that Britain’s ambassador may soon be packing his bags. Ominously, foreign ministry spokesman Hassan Qashqavi refused today to rule out expulsion of foreign ambassadors.
Unsourced reports are circulating, meanwhile, that British banks have frozen $1.6bn in funds belonging to Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the supreme leader. This supposed affront is cited as another reason for displeasure with Britain in high places.
Saner voices can still be heard above the din. ”Agitating, and [making] insulting propaganda against the people, who have constantly moved independently, and linking their peaceful actions to foreigners, is a symbol of wrong policies which increase the gap between the people and the government,” warned the reformist former president, Mohammad Khatami, at the weekend. But in its dash for foreign scapegoats, nobody in the regime is listening.
Iran’s obsession with specifically British interference has a long history, dating back to the Napoleonic era, and is to some degree justified. At that time London pledged military and other assistance in return for Iran’s help in keeping imperial Russia out of British India. But as Ali Ansari relates in his book, Confronting Iran, repeated British double-crosses, acts of bad faith, and shameless exploitation of Iran’s resources, convinced Iranians that while the Russians were bullies, ”the British were duplicitous at best”.
Even now, despite the demise of the British empire and reported Bush era covert operations aimed at regime change, senior Iranian figures continue to believe London, rather than the ”Great Satan” in Washington, is its most dangerous, potent antagonist.
None of this is at all helpful to the leader of the world’s current superpower. As he endures Republican accusations of timidity, Obama knows the more bitter the Iran crisis grows, the slimmer his chances of securing a ”grand bargain” involving renewed western engagement, a normalisation of relations, and a deal on Iran’s nuclear programme. Improved collaboration with Tehran on other key issues, such as Iraq, Afghanistan-Pakistan, counter-proliferation, and ultimately, Israel-Palestine, are other potential casualties.
Israel’s reaction to the turmoil is a good indicator of how much harder US-led attempts to talk calmly and do business with Iran have suddenly become. ”It is a regime whose real nature has been unmasked,” said prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu. He has argued all along that Iran’s hardliners were beyond reason and that Obama’s diplomatic opening was misguided.
Through their aggressive actions and rhetoric in the past week, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have gone a long way to making Netanyahu’s case for him. Speaking on American television, he didn’t quite say ”I told you so”. He didn’t have to.
guardian.co.uk