Over at Liberal Conspiracy Sunny makes a good point about the current diplomatic crisis with Iran.
If your authority was being undermined by street protests and an election widely seen as rigged – what’s the best way of uniting people behind you? Why, starting a diplomatic row of course, with the hope it will escalate into a bigger show of force.
And this is Ahmedinijad’s obvious gambit as Iran arrested nine staff working at the UK embassy on suspicion they took part in the recent street protests. The EU has now threatened a “strong response” to Iranian harassment of EU staff. Which is obviously what Ahmedinijad wants.
This is a diplomatic headache because escalating the war of words helps Ahmedinijad. At the same time, not many of the protesters are likely to believe Ahmedinijad’s latest attempt at diverting attention. We can play this in two ways: by not making a big fuss and denying Ahmedinijad what he wants. He may then try and escalate the situation and will shoot himself in the foot or quietly release the staff. Or the EU could escalate this massively with a real threat of war very quickly, and asking him for evidence of his claims. That would force Ahmedinijad to back down and expose his stupid gambit. I prefer the first option. But a muddle of the two is unlikely to work.
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And yet… what can you do? The “soft power” of the EU – sanctions, etc, must be preferable to any other kind of intervention.
Sunny’s is a typical knee-jerk liberal response of ‘when in doubt, spread your bets’. He’s opposing both the Ahmadinejad and the Mousavi camps! Great. This kind of hedging allows them manoeuvrability; wriggle-room for later should Mousavi fail to deliver so they can ditch him and still retain their liberal credentials. It’s a tepid, half-assed response.
I prefer Mansoor Moaddel’s response, who writes a guest post on Juan Cole’s Informed Comment blog: