Middle East
And then, remarkably, nothing happened
Published 21 June 2007
Historic talks between Iranian and US diplomats have been ignored by the media
A perfect illustration of how positive news often ends up on the newsroom spike is the silence over the war of words between the US/UK and Iran. In the first four months of this year, world headlines were dominated by rising fears that hostility and distrust between the two western allies and Iran could result in a military clash.
There was no end of possible triggers for a clash: the US had sent a huge naval battle group to the narrowest point of the Persian Gulf for the first time in many years, London and Washington were openly briefing selected journalists with flimsy evidence about alleged Iranian supplies to Iraqi "insurgents". The evidence was sometimes laughable, but US and British military briefers, desperate to find a "smoking gun" in Tehran, persisted.
All of this came to a head at the end of March with the surreal episode of the seizure of the British sailors by Iranian forces and their subsequent detention in Tehran. Tony Blair reacted theatrically by threatening all kinds of things that he quickly realised his government could not follow through on. The US president raised the stakes by calling the British sailors "hostages". The entire world was gripped by the possibility that the months of threats and military build-up could end in a war.
But then a remarkable thing happened: nothing. Amid all the angry words, the threats to take the matter to the UN, the US warships not moving from their positions in the Persian Gulf, Iran did not budge from its position. Someone's bluff was called and it wasn't Tehran's.
Something more encouraging has followed - dialogue. The talks merit the title "historic" but have received little media coverage. Last month, for the first time in almost three decades, American and Iranian diplomats sat opposite each other in a room in Baghdad and discussed how to improve security in Iraq. It is a decisive breakthrough that will be hard to come back from, despite the best efforts of diehard neocon ideologues in Washington.
Until recently, the Bush administration's doctrine of confronting Iran on the nuclear controversy and its role in Iraq was shaped by neocon think tanks, in particular the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The non-partisan and respected members of the Iraq Study Group (ISG), led by former secretary of state and Bush family friend James Baker, recommended that the US should engage Iran's help in Iraq and regionally.
President Bush, who is said to have described the ISG report as "a flaming turd", instead chose to follow the findings of a small forum at the AEI, which recommended a "troop surge" in Iraq. But barely had the surge begun than commanders on the ground made it clear this would not change anything. What followed were some of the highest US casualty rates in more than a year.
It was at this point that the Bush administration returned to the advice of the ISG and started a dialogue with Tehran for the first time since the Islamic revolution.
And, since then, Iran has fallen out of the headlines. Or rather it has ceased to attract the kind of "gagging for a confrontation" headlines that made media stories earlier this year.
The irony is that, just as the media has deemed Iran not to be so newsworthy, there has been a harsh crackdown by the Iranian authorities on dissidents, journalists and human rights activists. According to the Nobel peace laureate and campaigner Shirin Ebadi, censorship has been worse over the past few months than it has been for the previous two years.
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