Iran Away

If one needs any reason why the United States should not negotiate with Iran over the future of Iraq, then by all means look at what's going on between the United Kingdom and Iran over the issue of British sailors captured by Iranian authorities. Although the Brits have ample evidence that they were in Iraqi territorial waters and that the Iranians made a mistake, Iran refuses to admit to any mistakes and is once again insisting that it's always right. Right now both the British and the Iranians are trying to find a diplomatic solution without actually talking to each other, and the Brits have followed Eddie Cochran's advice and taken their problem to the United Nations.

Iran will always find a way to be on the winning end even when they are wrong. Bear in mind that Iran faced a brief hostage crisis of its own in 1980, when anti-Khomeini activists in London seized the Iranian embassy there. The Brits quickly put a stop to it, refusing to allow such a thing to happen on U.K. soil, and Iran claimed a moral victory - even as the Iranian government was holding 52 Americans hostage in our (now former) embassy in Tehran and humiliating us by ignoring international law. Okay, we kind of asked for it by supporting a monarch - the Shah - that his own people detested, but even a holy man like the Ayatollah Khomeini should have understood that two wrongs don't make a right. But then he didn't think taking 52 Americans hostage was wrong to begin with. And our sins of the past certainly gave him an excuse for his reasoning.

Even after the United States cut ties with Iran, other Western countries kept diplomatic relations with the Iranians, thinking they had no quarrel with them. These countries, the United Kingdom included, forgot that Iran is so hostile to the West in general, the Islamic republic will jump at any opportunity, no matter how contrived, to create geopolitical theater that aggrandizes their revolution at the West's expense. So why should the British deal with them directly anymore?

By the way, a semantic note is in order. The 1979-81 hostage seizure is referred to sometimes as the "Iranian hostage crisis." Dude, the hostages weren't Iranian - they were Americans!