Thursday, March 29, 2007
Guardian(!) calls for European unity in confronting Iran
The British forces were operating as part of a multinational force under an explicit UN mandate, to protect oil installations and prevent the smuggling of guns into Iraq - guns with which more Iraqis would otherwise be killed.We might laugh out loud at the crudity of all that, except that the circus has prompted the anti-American propaganda and financial machine into full swing, so that oil prices were rising, Democrats and liberals bellyaching, and hostages being paraded on TV and their 'confessions' published even as Ash typed his article.
According to the sophisticated GPS instruments which the British service personnel had with them, they were more than three kilometres inside Iraqi territorial waters when they went to search a suspect vessel. Reflecting the confusion inside the Iranian state, the first coordinates for the allegedly transgressing British boats given to the British by the Iranian government turned out to be within Iraqi territorial waters too (!)
Not until three days later did the Iranians come up with a second "corrected" set of coordinates which conveniently put the British forces on the wrong side of the line.
Foreseeing that, he cuts against the grain of the Guardian's traditional leftism by calling for European unity:
Those who follow ... (the hostage-taking) ... closely may wonder if the Revolutionary Guards were not making an indirect tit-for-tat response to American seizures of Iranians in Iraq, perhaps even hoping for a hostage swap.He suggests the suspension, pan-Europe, of Iranian export credit guarantees:
Or perhaps just an angry reaction to the latest UN security council resolution about Iran's nuclear programme - which was actually passed a day after the kidnapping, but its contents were well-known beforehand. That resolution extends targeted sanctions to companies controlled by the Revolutionary Guards and to individuals including the commander of the Revolutionary Guards navy. But I would bet my bottom euro that no ... continental Europeans' synapses will have fired spontaneously with this thought: "Our fellow-Europeans have been kidnapped, so what can we, as Europe, do in response?"
(T)here is something Europe should do: flex its economic muscles.
The EU is by far Iran's biggest trading partner. ... Remarkably, this trade has grown strongly in the last years of looming crisis. Much of it is underpinned by export credit guarantees given by European governments, notably those of Germany, France and Italy. ... Iran comes second to none in terms of the proportion of German exports - in recent years up to 65% - underwritten by the German government.The total government underwriting commitment in 2005 was €5.8bn (£3.9bn), ... As the squeeze grows on Iran from UN sanctions and their knock-on effects, and as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fails to deliver on his populist economic promises, this European trade becomes ever more vital ...
