On another side of this

Updated The big buzz and rush in much of the lefty blogosphere the last day or so was produced by Patrick Cockburn's assertion in Tuesday's The Independent (UK) that crisis over the seizure of the British sailors was actually the result of the US's attempt to kidnap two senior Iranian security officers who were on an official trip to an Iranian liaison office in the Iraqi city of Arbil in January.

The raid, carried out within a relatively few hours of Bush's bellicose January 10 speech in which he tried to blame Iran for US casualties in Iraq, captured

five relatively junior Iranian officials whom the US accuses of being intelligence agents and still holds.

In reality the US attack had a far more ambitious objective, The Independent has learned. The aim of the raid, launched without informing the Kurdish authorities, was to seize two men at the very heart of the Iranian security establishment.

Those being Mohammed Jafari, deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, intelligence chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

The assertion that the US wanted to grab the two Iranian officials is well-sourced; Cockburn quotes both Iranian and Kurdish sources. And in a different story, the one linked in the previous post, he notes the otherwise-odd

attempted abduction of five US soldiers in a highly sophisticated attack near the holy city of Kerbala, south of Baghdad, in which the assailants first tried to take prisoner the US soldiers but later killed them.

However, I have to be rather contrarian here and swim upstream against the current of progressive blogs. I harbor considerable doubts about the contention that the taking of the British sailors is connected to the US raid in January. Contrary to Cockburn, while the attack in Kerbala does bear striking marks of a tit-for-tat, the March 23 incident does not. Different country, different circumstances, different history: Remember, a very similar incident between the UK and Iran had taken place in 2004.

Remember, too, that if this is thought of as a tit-for-tat, it lends credence to the British claim that the boats were in Iraqi waters. If they were in fact in Iranian waters, the Iranians could well have taken them for precisely that reason alone.

Remember, three, that if Iran wanted to play tit-for-tat, it seems the deaths of the Americans in Kerbala would have accomplished that. So what was the next US or UK tit that produced this particular tat?

And it's not like Iran had no desire for, or impulse toward having, bargaining chips. Despite its defiance, Tehran assuredly is not happy with the sanctions imposed on it so far over its nuclear program (which, I note briefly and parenthetically, I'm not convinced is intended to produce a bomb but I do think it's more likely than not) and now it's facing even tougher ones.

It also has been the target of very threatening language coming out of the White House and in March the US staged war games in the Persian Gulf with two aircraft carries and a total of 15 warships.

The two-carrier deployment in the Gulf was the highest level of U.S. naval presence in the gulf since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003,

Defense News reported last week.

Now, that fact is that the rumors running rapidly around the Web of a planned US attack this Friday are surely bogus. (You heard it here first!) For one thing, the claimed Jerusalem Post article on the matter doesn't exist anywhere on its website and the one place I found that supposedly linked to it actually linked to sending a letter to the editor. And for all the posting, it turns out to be tail-chasing, as everything always comes back to a single source, a supposed article by a "well-known" Russian journalist writing in a Russian weekly - a weekly, more than one source insists, akin to the Weekly World News.

But the very fact that the report was accepted so readily by so many is an indication of the atmosphere that has been created, one in which Iran could with justice fear an attack.

What's more, I believe Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad didn't get the response he expected to his conference on the Holocaust in December; it was a nice propaganda forum but I think he expected to have his reputation embellished rather more than it was. And his government is not without a fair amount of internal opposition.

All in all, a man - and a government - that could use a domestic distraction and a little international leverage. Many people, and not just wingnuts, accepted that Bill Clinton would bomb a pharmaceutical plant to distract attention from Monica Lewinsky. Is it that hard, then, to imagine someone else might snatch some sailors to a similar end?

In fact, one Iranian exile group claims exactly that, that

the capture of 15 British naval personnel was premeditated "to win concessions from the international community and divert attention from its nuclear projects."

The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) said that a Revolutionary Guard garrison was on full alert from the night before the incident.

Hossein Abedini, of the organization’s foreign affairs committee, told a press conference in London that the move was a "meticulously concocted operation".

I have to admit, however, that the source is not exactly credible: NCRI would fairly be described as Iran's equivalent to Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and just as interested in provoking a Western attack on Iran as Chalabi was in the case of Iraq.

So what are we left with? Ultimately, given all the circumstances as I understand them, I simply find Cockburn's claim that the seizure of the British sailors was the result of the US seizure of the Iranian officials seriously unpersuasive. There are simply too many other factors and too many other at least equally plausible explanations.

So what do I think happened? Personally, I think the simplest explanation is the most likely: Either the Brits thought they were in Iraqi waters but actually were in Iranian waters or they were in Iraqi waters but the Iranians thought they were in Iranian waters. In other words, somebody screwed up. No conspiracies, no aggression, no espionage, no "meticulous operation." A screw-up under tense conditions conducive to precisely that sort of screw-up. The two sides started to go all macho on each other but managed to realize things could easily get out of hand and started started thinking about how to disentangle without looking like they were backing down.

My prediction: The crew gets released in exchange for some kind of statement out of London kind of like a nolo contendre, one that Iran can say is an apology and an admission but the UK can say is not, not really. Maybe the five Iranians get released, although I doubt it as that part runs straight into Bushite pig-headedness. If they are released, I expect there'll be a delay, some way to as least strike the pose that the two events are not related.

So crisis averted - but problem not solved and overall atmosphere of confrontation continues. We'll see how I do.

Footnote One: Cockburn reminds us that in the wake of the attack in Kerbala, the US blamed the episode on Iraqi Shias acting as proxies for Iran. We should also remind ourselves, then, that at the time, that claim was derided as both ridiculous and an attempt to foster war hysteria against Iran. Now, however, it becomes a link in a chain of evidence connecting the US kidnapping to the Iranian seizure and thus, it's said, blaming the latter on the former. To the extent we say it's true now, to that same extent we are saying we were wrong before.

Just sayin'.

Footnote Two: What's this about? ABC News said on Monday that

[a]n American citizen is missing in Iran, the State Department said today.

Sources tell ABC News that the missing American was a former FBI agent, although they stressed that he was now a private citizen and that his trip to Iran was on "private business" and not associated with official U.S. matters.

State spokesman Sean McCormack said that the United States had been monitoring this case for several weeks and today had sent a message to Iran through diplomatic channels for more information on his whereabouts. ...

McCormack denied any connection between this case and that of the 15 British sailors and marines being held by Iran for allegedly straying into Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf.

You've been monitoring this for several weeks and there's no connection with the British sailors? Then pardon me for my cynicism, but why the hell did you bring it up now?

Updated to note that I spelled the town "Kerbala" in line with Cockburn's spelling so it would be consistent throughout. US media and blogs usually spell it "Karbala," as I have the previous times I've referred to it. I doubt one is to be preferred to the other since they are both attempts to phonetically Anglicize Arabic names, but I mention it here just to avoid any possible confusion.