The Chess Players of Teheran

OK, so where have we ended up? After all the tough language, alarm about where the standoff was heading, the quiet diplomacy and the murmurings of secret deals, we find ourselves in a situation in which the Iranian government – the people who started this whole thing off – has got two things out of it. Firstly, even if no-one in the west quite accepts at face value Ahmadinejad’s claim that the release is a “gift”, he has managed to create the impression that the Iranian regime is at least reasonably human and prepared to take a humanitarian action in releasing those held. And second, Iran has reminded everyone forcefully that it is a country which expects and needs to be treated with care and respect in that region.

If I were directing Iranian strategy I think I would regard these as pretty good outcomes – reminding western governments that it needs to be taken seriously, while simultaneously making a ‘soft’ appeal to western publics that it is not so bad after all. In fact it has turned out so well for the Iranian regime – or rather more precisely the very different strands which participate in the governance of Iran – that I find it difficult to believe that this was not, broadly, the outcome they had prepared and planned for right from the start.

Iran has managed the whole issue very professionally from the start - with a particularly sharp eye for what will appeal to the western media. The people behind their PR strategy had certainly learnt the lesson about the need to keep the story constantly moving on for it to stay in the news, with a new development every day to report. I don’t know if they had expected a woman to be one of those they captured, but if they didn’t plan that then the spin doctors masterminding it all must have thought that their birthdays had come early when they discovered they had Leading Seaman Faye Turney among their crop. Getting her to write and then read out letters which focussed on her daughter left behind in Britain was a brilliant way to ensure that the story both stayed in the news and engaged western public sympathy – as well as preparing the ground very well for the eventual release in a blaze of faux-humanitarian bonhomie – a media event of which a Saturday night television schedule planner could be proud!

And of course the publicity doesn’t stop here. Iran is releasing today 15 fully-fledged instant TV personalities into the world-famous British media scrum, where they will surely continue to keep the story alive for many more weeks at least. If Faye Turney doesn’t either release a biography or appear on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here in the next year or two then I’ll eat my hat. No doubt their Iranian captors have indeed treated them well, as they kept reassuring us, and I shall be similarly astonished if we don’t see stories in the press with former captives highlighting the generous treatment they received. People study beliefs and systems that they oppose, with an intricate fascination, and the Iranian government’s strategists are no novices when it comes to understanding the workings of the British media circus.

There is some reason to believe that the Iranian government had intended to start releasing the captives several days earlier than they did. Last week they announced that they would release Faye Turney, but then withdrew that offer. Perhaps they were forced to make some change to their pre-arranged plan, delaying the detailed arrangements for release – or perhaps in fact the announcement and then the withdrawal of the offer was always intended to be just another way of keeping the story running.

What ostensibly forced them to withdraw it, and something that we understand Iranian diplomats have been saying that they really did not appreciate, was the UK involving the UN and the EU, as well as other governments in the region. It’s difficult to see what real grounds Iran has to be upset about this – they are after all relevant institutions in international law, and it’s difficult to escape the conclusion Iran’s only real grounds for annoyance was that that was not part of their pre-arranged plan. The British Government was obviously fully entitled and always very likely to take any action it thought fit in response to the seizing of some of its personnel, and as aggressive actions go, taking the issue to the UN was very far from the most robust response that the British government might have taken.

And in fact I think the British government was absolutely right to take the issue to those bodies, for the more important reason that it is far better for the whole situation, and for the security of all of us, for the international community as a whole to respond to the Iranian seizure, and not just one government.

If taking it to the UN made Iran seem isolated and acted counter to the wishes of the Iranian government, then perhaps it may just have been the right thing to do.

Throughout the history of negotiations over its development of nuclear weapons over the last few years, we are told, one of the Iranian government’s favourite techniques has been to make an ambitious demand going well beyond what is regarded as acceptable, leading to fierce negotiations about whether they should be entitled to do that. But then at the final stage they have simply agreed to yield the point easily, saying that it was never that big an issue after all.

This incident seems to be simply the latest instance of that approach again. Iran started the crisis, milked it extremely effectively to get across its different messages to the western governments and the western public, and has now unilaterally resolved it, again to achieve some of its aims. Somebody somewhere in Teheran can put a very large tick in the box that they have achieved one of their performance appraisal targets for this month.