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Almost 20 years ago, in 2007, the Iranian Revolutionary Government kidnapped 15 members of the British Royal Navy and other British Marine personnel. The Iranians claimed that the British vessel had strayed from Iraqi waters into Iranian territorial waters.
And so for almost two weeks the Iranians used the captured Brits as pawns, paraded them on their nightly TV shows, and forced the captives as well as the British government into a grovelling, humiliating apology. Eventually the captured Brits were returned home with some humiliating goody-bags.
I suspect that the story will be different today if the Iranian navy attempts to capture any American vessels. If they try that in the days to come they should expect a very different sort of outcome.
This week President Trump announced that an American “armada” was heading towards Iran, ready to get there by this morning. The vessels include the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier. As the President pointed out, the fleet he has sent towards Iran was not only moving “quickly, with great power, enthusiasm, and purpose” but is larger than the fleet he recently sent to Venezuela.
A pointed reminder to the Mullahs.
Of course the bellicose Iranian regime responded in its usual fashion. One senior advisor to Iran´s “Supreme Leader” claimed that if America were to strike Iranian targets the response from Iran would be “immediate, comprehensive and unprecedented.”
This is just the latest tit-for-tat exchange between Washington and Tehran. In recent weeks President Trump has made it clear that if the Iranian regime carries out mass executions of protestors then they will get an immediate response from the US military. So far that response has not happened. And there are a number of explanations why.
Perhaps it is because the Trump administration believed rumors that the Iranian regime had halted a plan to publicly execute more than 800 protestors. Yet the Iranian regime’s own spokesmen have said that this claim is “completely false.” The regime in Tehran is actually proud of their mass executions.
Besides, there is no need to draw a line at the Revolutionary Government hanging protestors in their town squares when they are shooting them by the thousands. Sometimes every day.
Other people say that some of America’s regional allies are warning the US to delay. Perhaps they fear the consequence of a plan which is either half-baked or not seen through to completion. Others are wondering what “completion” would look like.
Many such concerns in the region — and here in America — are the result of a 2003 mindset. People are worried that toppling the regime in Tehran would have results similar to the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
But there are a lot of differences between 2003 and today.
Not least is that today it is the Iranian people who are out on the streets protesting their own government. It is the Iranian people who have had enough of their tyrannical rulers, with their Islamic extremism and insane anti-American foreign policy that has made the country such a pariah. The Iranian people have a memory of relative freedom before the Ayatollah took charge. And many of them would like that memory to be turned once again into reality.
Just as important is the fact that one of the main reasons why the post-2003 debacle in Iraq happened was precisely because of the Iranian regime. The regime which itself is now teetering.
It was the Iranians who flooded their forces and their weaponry into post-Saddam Iraq. It was the Iranians who made the roadside bombs that killed thousands of American and other allied soldiers in Iraq. It was Iranian military and other forces who made Iraq into such a death-trap for the US. And it was the Iranian regime which moved into the vacuum that was created after the fall of Saddam Hussein — effectively turning Iraq into a vassal state of Iran.
Almost wherever you look in the Middle East it is the same story. Yemen? It is the Iranians who have been arming the Houthi militia who have targeted US military and diplomatic personnel. Without Iranian backing the Houthis wouldn’t know how to launch a canoe.
It is the same in Lebanon, where Iran’s armies have helped to destroy the country and make sure it remains in a state of permanent civil and religious strife. It is the same almost everywhere else in the world you look.
It is Iran that has spread its terror as far afield as Bulgaria and Buenos Aires. It is this Iranian government that has tried to kill a British novelist for the crime of writing a novel and assassinate a resident of Brooklyn for the crime of criticizing the revolutionary regime.
For decades the regime in Iran has acted with near impunity in all of these territories and more. And the response from the international community has been alternately either to try to isolate the regime or to bring them in from the cold. American governments and their European counterparts have spent decades on the one hand trying to cut off the Ayatollahs and another showering them with cash.
Perhaps it is for this reason that the Mullahs think they can get away with absolutely anything. Because for almost 47 years they have managed to do just that. They can massacre their own people on their own streets. They can spread terrorism around the planet. And they can abduct Western naval personnel, humiliate them, force confessions send them home with goody-bags.
Well they might have found the wrong adversary in this White House.
People often ask me what I think President Trump is going to do about a particular issue. And I tend to say the same thing, whatever the subject: Look at what he has said he is going to do, and that is the thing he is most likely to do.
The Iranian people have risen up with incredible bravery against their tyrannical government. President Trump has told the regime to stop the massacres of protestors, but the massacres go on.
So it’s over to Trump.
Which may well mean it’s over for the Ayatollah.
Not before time.