War Drums....

The ongoing game of "chicken" being played between Western powers and Iran accelerated over the weekend. Consider these headlines from Drudge today:

EU to slap oil embargo on Iran...
Iran 'definitely' closing Strait of Hormuz...
Tensions rise, 'unpredictable' phase...
UK, US, France send warships through Strait...

And this is taking place in an election year where the American president is torn by conflicting pressures -- to solidify his foreign policy and national defense credentials, and to placate the non-interventionist base of his party. It is going to be interesting.... 

Turmoil in Iran

There are gas riots taking place in Iran. The government suddenly and arbitrarily imposed gas rationing and the driving public has not responded well. [Look at how the American public responds to gas prices -- drivers around the world are not so different after all] The problem is that, although Iran has plenty of oil, it has no refining capacity and has to import gasoline and this makes the country vulnerable to trade pressures which are being applied.

There is speculation all over the web that these disturbances might represent a prelude to the long-anticipated rising of the Iranian people to overthrow the mullahs.

Not very likely, I would say. We've seen these kinds of violent protests before -- many, many times. And each time there is speculation that this time the mullahs will fall, but they never do.

Pajamas Media has pictures, even moving ones, here.
So does Gateway Pundit..., lots of them here.

For some reason the MSM doesn't report these sorts of things very much. Wonder why?

Ross on the British Hostage Crisis

While the Western press portrayed the British hostage crisis as a humiliating defeat for the West, Dennis Ross points out that it certainly did not look that way in Iran.

He argues that the hostage taking was planned and carried out by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which is spoiling for confrontation with the West, but that it had not been approved by the nation's religious leadership. What followed, unnoticed by the MSM, was a humiliating defeat, not for the West, but for the Islamic radicals.

First, note that the Iranian press did not even mention the crisis for several days after the British sailors were seized: This was hardly a case in which the regime was trying to whip the public into a frenzy. On the contrary, it seemed to downplay the issue. Second, after the release of the sailors, Ahmadinejad was roundly criticized in many Iranian newspapers, with several articles making the point that the crisis cost Iran greatly without any corresponding benefit. Third, Admadinejad himself acknowledged that the British made no concessions when he said that they weren't big enough to admit mistake; and an article in the Iranian newspaper Aftab e Yazd even suggested that the Iranians were coerced into letting the sailors go: "If we wanted, as the president says, to pardon them while we had the authority to try them, why did we not release them before Blair's ultimatum or three days after it?"

It is hard to escape the conclusion that Ahmadinejad was a loser in the crisis, and that other Iranian leaders decided they needed to cut their losses. Interestingly, I know from speaking to British officials that they were surprised when Ahmadinejad announced the release of the sailors in his press conference. They had expected that there were going to be more quiet talks with the Iranians, in part to work out the details of the release and in part to discuss, without any British apology, how to minimize the possibility of avoiding future such problems. This was how they expected the Iranians to climb down.

And, yet, the Iranians ended the crisis unilaterally.

Read the whole thing here.

The lesson to be learned -- when assessing the situation in Iran, pay no attention to what their nut-job President says, instead look at what the real powers in the Islamic Republic do, or more importantly, don't do.

Kidnapped!

Well, well, well..., the British Left has decided where to place blame for Iran's kidnapping of fifteen British troops.

It's all America's fault... surprise!

The Independent charges that the hostage taking was reprisal for a "botched" American attempt ten weeks ago to kidnap senior Iranian officials who were for some reason in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Read it here.

But if that's the case, what do you make of this [hat tip Wretchard]?

Time reports on an apparent attempt last year by Iranian forces to take a US patrol hostage:

U.S. soldiers from the 5th Squadron 73rd Cavalry 82nd Airborne were accompanying Iraqi forces on a routine joint patrol along the border with Iran, about 75 miles east of Baghdad, when they spotted two Iranian soldiers retreating from Iraqi territory back into Iran. A moment later, U.S. and Iraqi forces came upon a third Iranian soldier on the Iraqi side of the border, who stood his ground. As U.S. and Iraqi soldiers approached the Iranian officer and began speaking with him, a platoon of Iranian soldiers appeared and moved to surround the coalition patrol, taking up positions on high ground. At that point, according to the Army's statement, the Iranian captain told the U.S. and Iraqi soldiers that if they tried to leave they would be fired on. Fearing abduction by the Iranians, U.S. troops moved to go anyway, and fighting broke out. Army officials say the Iranian troops fired first with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades, and that U.S. troops fell further back into Iraqi territory, while four Iraqi army soldiers, one interpreter and one Iraqi border guard remained in the hands of the Iranians.

The official release says there were no casualties among the Americans, and makes no mention of any on the Iranian side. U.S. soldiers present at the firefight, however, tell TIME that American forces killed at least one Iranian soldier who had been aiming a rocket-propelled grenade at their convoy of Humvees.

Read the whole thing here.

I'm sure that, given enough time, the Left will find something that they can present as a provocation to justify this earlier attempt at hostage-taking.

And so it goes....

UPDATE:

Ahmadinejad has announced that the hostages will be released. Guess kidnapping doesn't have the payoffs it used to have when he was a young man.

Iran -- Prospects for the Future

Jonah Goldberg, down on the Corner, makes a very pertinent observation regarding Iran's political culture. Reacting to a Time magazine report of a speech at which President Ahmadinejad was heckled by irate students he concludes:

This just isn't that repressive a society. For all the talk of Iran's autocratic tyrants, here you have the president being burned in effigy, interrupted by firecrackers, and condemned to death, all while he's giving a speech. And he does nothing more than "smilie tightly" throughout it! In this country, if an activist exposes an anti-war t-shirt while the president is talking, she gets muscled out of the room. That's not to say Iran doesn't have all sorts of human rights violations of its own, but the attempt to make the country look like some sort of tyrannical, dictatorial regime is just another element of the war propaganda.

Read it here.

Absolutely! For years we have been hearing from analysts on all sides fantasies about Iran. These are based on three indisputable points:

1) Iran's leadership is trying strenuously to establish itself as a regional hegemon.

2) Iranian students are largely disaffected from the regime, but don't pose a real revolutionary threat.

3) Iran has disaffected ethnic minorities that do pose a real revolutionary threat, especially the Kurds.

Opponents of the war have long predicted that extensive protest bubbling under the surface will eventually lead to an overthrow of the Mullahs or dissolution of the multi-ethnic Iranian state. Ain't gonna happen, although the protests will continue, especially in the north!

Proponents of military action point to Iran's pan-Islamist propaganda, anti-Western actions, and development of nuclear weapons, all of which are part of its drive for regional hegemony, as posing a clear and present threat to the West. Ain't so, although Israel certainly has cause to be worried.

Advocates of "soft" power and diplomacy only solutions have argued that increasing Iranian engagement with the West will lead to an acceptable resolution of current issues. Ain't gonna happen! Talk not backed by a realistic prospect of severe economic or military sanctions will prove to be useless. Iran will continue to be a focus of regional tension for a long, long time.

Bush bashers predict that he will lead us into war against Iran. Ain't gonna happen, and everyone knows it!

Regarding the threat to regimes throughout the region -- the most probable outcome is the emergence of a united Sunni front that will rely to a great extent on Western aid, especially guarantees from the United States, much like the coalition that emerged to resist the expansion of Soviet power into Western Europe at the end of WWII. If so, Iranian aggression will actually strengthen, not weaken, US and Western influence in the region.

Iran's actions to quell ethnic unrest have resulted in real human rights abuses that are rightly denounced by the West, but are hardly on the scale of the kinds of atrocities committed by Saddam's regime in Iraq, and look what happened when the US finally moved against that monster.

What does it all add up to? There ain't gonna be a war -- not anytime soon. But there will be continued provocation and tension caused by Iran's expansionist ambitions.

There will be no general Islamist revolution throughout the region, although there will be continued Islamist activity and agitation everywhere, much of it supported by Iran.

Political partisans in the US will continue to milk the situation for political advantage and in the course of doing so will spin ever more absurd fantasies which will be eagerly be broadcast by the press.

There will be no resolution to the Iran problem anytime soon.

Iranian actions and our response to them will have a major impact on the development of West Asia for a long time to come.

Mini cold war anyone?