Rootless Cosmopolitan – By Tony Karon

Continuing my series on the 50 “rabbis” (teachers) who most influenced my understanding of being Jewish in the world, I offer up three more to coincide with Israel’s Independence Day .

9. Avraham Burg
Former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg was a decorated paratrooper and the son of a prominent conservative cabinet minister before he played a prominent role in Peace Now and the anti-Lebanon war movement. But what got my attention was Burg’s passionate denunciation of the state of contemporary Israel from the perspective of a left-Zionist idealist: “The Israeli nation today rests on a scaffolding of corruption, and on foundations of oppression and injustice… There may yet be a Jewish state here, but it will be a different sort, strange and ugly… The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or anti-missile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed. It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive.” And so on — read it, it’s a powerful piece. I don’t share Burg’s belief that Zionism itself can be redeemed. But I do share is conviction that Jewish identity is meaningless unless it serves a higher purpose, the purpose of universal justice. And he seems to feel the same way, writing in Haaretz last year that he finds Diaspora Jews who are committed to justice his natural allies rather than fellow Israelis who have turned their backs on it. Exactly. That’s the interesting conversation.

11. Uri Avnery
On Yom Kippur in 1979, as a young Zionist of the socialist (and atheist) persuasion, I didn’t go to shul; instead I stayed home and read a book I’d found in the shelf of one of my madrichim (older leaders of Habonim): It was Uri Avnery’s “Israel Without Zionism,” and the effect it had was profound. My misgivings about Zionism had been growing, not only because its narrow nationalist concerns seemed at odds with the universal justice that I saw as its purpose, but also because I was better acquainted with its history. In Habonim we knew about events like the Deir Yassin massacre, and didn’t try to hide from them. They were the work, after all, of the Irgun/Likud/Betar, whom we deemed dangerous fascists. But we clung to the idea that our side, the Haganah/Labor side, had remained pure and noble. The Betarim laughed at us; how did we think Israel would have had a Jewish majority were it not for events like Dir Yassin scaring the Palestinians into fleeing? And here came Uri Avnery recounting the same stories, and more, giving the lie to the “miracle” in which 700,000 people simply walked away from their homes in response to Arab radio broadcasts urging them to leave. Avnery chronicled the ethnic cleansing activities of his own unit. And he offered a vision of a union with the Arab world, which later inspired him to be one of the founders of the Israeli peace movement. Definitely more useful than a day spent in shul watching the alte kakkers sniffing snuff to keep themselves awake… Avnery established, for me, the principle that to recognize the truth of Israel’s history, and to renounce Zionism, was not somehow to betray my Jewishness. He was the first Israeli I read saying Israel could not deny the pain it had inflicted on others; facing up to it and acknowledging it was, in fact, the Jewish thing to do.

20. Martin Buber
The early Zionist philosopher who moved to Palestine in 1938 was one of the most prominent advocates, in the years immediately before Israeli statehood, of the idea of a single, binational state for Jews and Arabs founded on the basis of equality. The partition of Palestine, he said, could only be achieved and sustained by violence, which he abhorred. For Buber, the Zionist idea was premised on it fulfilling the Biblical injunction to be a moral “light unto the nations.” But he could already sense that the dominant strain in the Zionist movement was the opposite, and would have the effect, at great moral cost, of simply trying to make the Jews a nation like any other. In this schema of “normalization,” the Jews simply had to acquire a territory and a common language, and the rest would take care of itself. He saw this as a reflection of a longstanding tension inside Judaism: The powerful injunction to make the pursuit of truth and justice the very purpose of Judaism, and he wrote, “the natural desire, all too natural, to be ‘like the nations.’ The ancient Hebrews did not succeed in becoming a normal nation. Today, the Jews are succeeding at it to a terrifying degree.” He advocated Jews and Arabs creating a single democratic state in Palestine in 1948. And he warned that those who pursued sovereignty for a Jewish majority state of Israel were making war inevitable. Referring to the Arab population of Palestine, he asked, “what nation will allow tiself to be demoted from the position of majority to that of a minority without a fight?” He warned that the the path taken in 1948 would extinguish the progressive potential of his idealistic Zionism. Which it did. The moral idealism at the center of the old left-Zionist ideology did not survive contact with the living, real population of Palestine. Buber had the courage and prescience to recognize that and warn the Zionist movement of the moral cul-de-sac down which it was heading.

Listen to Lillian Thuram

Looking at the political choices facing voters in France, today, I’m glad I’m not French — although I guess I would be if the Catholic Church hadn’t driven France’s Jews out in the 14th century, starting my family on its way to Poland where Caron became Karon to keep the pronunciation. Still a Francophile of sorts, and still have family there — my father’s cousin Adam, who survived the Holocaust in Poland being hidden by Catholics from the Nazis, ended up living in Paris in 1945, and still does. Ariel Sharon doesn’t think France’s Jews belong in France, and that’s always been the Zionist position (and, of course, that of the anti-Semites) since Theodore Herzl attended the Dreyfuss trial in 1895, and declared it “futile” to try and combat anti-Semitism.

Of course, I could never agree with this; Jews are historically part of France, as we are historically part of many parts of Europe, and anyone who denies that, whether anti-Semite or Zionist, can go… Well, okay, let’s not get rude. We’ll leave that to Monsieur ‘orrible.

And it’s in affirmation of this principle, and my sheer love of Jews who laugh in the face of and give the finger to anti-Semitism and associated right-wing pretensions, that I put the legendary Serge Gainsbourg on the list my 50 most influential rabbis:

Here’s the citation:
5. Serge Gainsbourg
No pop-cultural icon ever rattled France as much as Serge Gainsbourg did, from the moment he burst into notoriety in 1969 with the heavy breathing “Je T’Aime,” the favorite Barmitzvah party slowdance of my era. The French establishment, not exactly the most philo-Semitic bunch, loathed Gainsbourg for his chutzpah, a vaguely ugly Jew who didn’t give a crap about exposing their pretenses and hypocrisies. And why should he? He’d had to wear the yellow star during the Nazi occupation, and he saw just how “courageous” his neighbors had been in standing up to the Nazis (contra the Gaullist myth that all or most of France had been with the Resistance). And if they had a problem with his aesthetic provocations, he wasn’t about to make them feel comfortable. Gainsbourg cut and mixed and mashed, lampooning Frenchness and its denied but nonetheless palpable fascination with America, and committed the ultimate patriotic sin of recording a reggae version of Le Marseillaise (“Aux Armes, Etc.” — Click here to hear it — that’s Rita Marley doing backing vocals…) mocking French jingoism. Naturally, the French establishment plotzed. That was the idea. And let’s not even talk about the Whitney Houston encounter

On Sunday’s election, I know the choices are grim. But I was moved recently by the news reports of a black policeman in France putting his own life on the line to rescue a Jewish football fan being attacked by a neo-Nazi mob in Paris. And that’s why I’d urge all those justifiably impressed by Nicolas Sarkozy’s promises to loosen the bureaucratic stranglehold on France’s sclerotic economy to carefully consider the warnings by Lillian Thuram, hero of the 1998 World Cup winning French team, that Sarkozy is a racist who France cannot embrace.

By way of further preview to my personal “50 Most Influential Rabbis” (i.e. people who taught me something about being Jewish in the world), following Sunday’s salute to Primo Levi, it is timely to introduce Amira Hass, if only because of the profound op-ed she penned in Haaretz to coincide with Shoah Day in Israel.

First my Amira Hass entry on the Rabbi list:
7. Amira Hass
Like a Biblical prophet determined to confront the Biblical Israelites with their moral failings, Amira Hass has dedicated her life to holding up a mirror to the State of Israel so that it can see itself, and its actions, through the eyes of those it has most impacted: the dispossessed and disenfranchised Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. Her courageous work as an Israeli journalist determined to show her compatriots the effect their policies are having on their immediate neighbors makes her, for me, a living embodiment of Hillell’s insistence that being Jewish means weighing your actions first and foremost on the basis of their effect on others. The daughter of Holocaust survivors who had been communist partisans fighting the Nazis in Europe, Hass has taken up the plight of the Palestinians — she lives in Ramallah, as Haaretz correspondent there — with her parents’ blessing: “My parents came here to Israel naively. They were offered a house in Jerusalem. But they refused it. They said: ‘We cannot take the house of other refugees.’ They meant Palestinians. So you see, it’s not such a big deal that I write what I do – it’s not a big deal that I live among Palestinians.”

This week, in a Haaretz op ed, Hass castigated Israel for its cynical use of the Holocaust as a “political asset.” She draws attention to the shoddy treatment of survivors in Israel, many of whom see hardly a penny of the millions claimed in their name as reparations from Germany. But her primary concern is the political use to which the Holocaust is put:

Turning the Holocaust into a political asset serves Israel primarily in its fight against the Palestinians. When the Holocaust is on one side of the scale, along with the guilty (and rightly so) conscience of the West, the dispossession of the Palestinian people from their homeland in 1948 is minimized and blurred.

The phrase “security for the Jews” has been consecrated as an exclusive synonym for “the lessons of the Holocaust.” It is what allows Israel to systematically discriminate against its Arab citizens. For 40 years, “security” has been justifying control of the West Bank and Gaza and of subjects who have been dispossessed of their rights living alongside Jewish residents, Israeli citizens laden with privileges.

Security serves the creation of a regime of separation and discrimination on an ethnic basis, Israeli style, under the auspices of “peace talks” that go on forever. Turning the Holocaust into an asset allows Israel to present all the methods of the Palestinian struggle (even the unarmed ones) as another link in the anti-Semitic chain whose culmination is Auschwitz. Israel provides itself with the license to come up with more kinds of fences, walls and military guard towers around Palestinian enclaves.

Separating the genocide of the Jewish people from the historical context of Nazism and from its aims of murder and subjugation, and its separation from the series of genocides perpetrated by the white man outside of Europe, has created a hierarchy of victims, at whose head we stand. Holocaust and anti-Semitism researchers fumble for words when in Hebron the state carries out ethnic cleansing via its emissaries, the settlers, and ignore the enclaves and regime of separation it is setting up. Whoever criticizes Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians is denounced as an anti-Semite, if not a Holocaust denier. Absurdly, the delegitimization of any criticism of Israel only makes it harder to refute the futile equations that are being made between the Nazi murder machine and the Israeli regime of discrimination and occupation.

The institutional abandonment of the survivors is rightly denounced across the board. The transformation of the Holocaust into a political asset for use in the struggle against the Palestinians feed on those same stores of official cynicism, but it is part of the consensus.

I’ve been slowly at work, for weeks now, on a project spawned by Newsweek’s decision idiotic to publicize a rather silly list of America’s 50 most influential rabbis according to a couple of corporate executive types. (Sorry, Gary, but it’s true!) I’m compiling a list of my own most influential rabbis, which I want to do in conversation with readers, but my definition of a “rabbi” is someone whose life story, moral example or work has taught me something profound or inspiring about being a Jew in the world.

Because today is the 20th anniversary of his death, possibly by suicide, in his apartment building in Turin, I’ve decided to roll out my number one entry. More to come soon. But tonight we salute Primo Levi.

1. Primo Levi
I think I wept with joy when I first read Primo Levi (The Periodic Table, on a flight from Johannesburg to London in 1989). His was, for me, a matchlessly inspiring example of being Jewish in the world rather than separately from it. A man of science and ethics, fully integrated into Italian society and its most progressive elements, he found himself in Auschwitz not as a result of a Nazi roundup of Italian Jews, but because he was a captured in the course of his work as an anti-Fascist partisan fighter. When the Germans occupied Italy in 1942, he responded as a Jew — not in any narrow, tribal sense (indeed, he didn’t identified as such) but in the expansive, moral sense; in other words, he responded as any decent person with a love of justice and freedom, by joining the partisan underground. Not any separate Jewish organization, but the partisans bound by a common, universal ideology of justice and freedom, in which any Jew should feel comfortable. As did a lot of Italian Jews of his generation: The filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, most famous for The Battle of Algiers, and also a partisan, was once quoted as saying “I am not an out-and-out revolutionary. I am merely a man of the Left, like a lot of Italian Jews.” Yet, once captured as a leftist partisan, it was the Nazis who reduced Primo Levi’s identity to that of a Jew, in a “racial” sense. His writing — by far the most compelling tales of life and death in Auschwitz — chronicles the Holocaust experience with both scouring emotion and the cool eye of reason, always seeking its universal meanings and implications. His audience, always, is a global community of likeminded rather than one defined on any narrow nationalist basis — Zionism had little use for Primo Levi; his work was only translated into Hebrew after his death.

Indeed, he seems to resist the temptations of nationalism — of allowing the Nazis to succeed in defining him against his own instincts — remaining intensely universalist in his outlook, although deeply rooted in its specificity: He loved Italian Jewry and its unique history, of which he was an exemplary product. Also, while he writes what for me are the most profound and compelling first-hand accounts of — and meditations oni — life in the camps, he is at once the quintessential Holocaust writer but never simply a Holocaust writer. He returns continually to explore the magic of science and humanity in everyday life and work, the ethics and values that took him, as an Italian Jew, into the mountains with the anti-Fascist partisan resistance. The profound effect of the Holocaust on Primo Levi’s life was central to his work, but his life continued after the Holocaust. It did not end his life, literally or figuratively — he went on exploring the universal human condition, a vital presence in the wider world for whom he saw the Holocaust, and his own experience of it, as a teaching moment whose meanings were universal.

The Iran-Britain standoff looks to be over with Iran’s announcement that it will send the 15 captive Britons home. And it’s not surprising that Tehran is claiming victory: It has used the incident to sound a warning to the U.S. and its allies that Tehran will retaliate if the U.S. persists in its provocative program of seizing Iranian officials in Iraq, then let it cool before it could escalate into something more dangerous. And despite the insistence that there was no quid-pro-quo, it’s hard to avoid the impression that some form of prisoner swap is the basis for resolving the stand-off. Not only was one Iranian captive held by U.S.-linked forces in Iraq released on Monday; it now appears that Iran is finally to be given consular access to five officials held incommunicado by the U.S. since they were snatched in January. To be sure, the government of Iraq said this week it was lobbying intensively for the U.S. to free five Iranians because their release, in the words of Iraq’s foreign ministry, “will be a factor that will help in the release of the British sailors and marines.” Indeed.

Patrick Coburn reported yesterday that the context of Iran’s capture of the Brits is the U.S. attempt to seize two senior Iranian military officials in that raid in Erbil. As Paul Woodward notes, these actions by the U.S. — which may also include the case of a top Iranian Revolutionary Guard official who recently disappeared in Turkey (Western officials off the record say he defected; the Iranians say he was kidnapped) — are a coherent campaign designed to put pressure on Iran by targetting top officials. This policy of kidnapping is even applauded by Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, who writes that the fact that the U.S. “apprehended five Iranians” in Erbil is one of the clever ways in which the U.S. is putting pressure on Iran without actually resorting to force. Zakaria is usually a sober and thoughtful commentator, which is why that casual endorsement of kidnapping is so outrageous — not simply legally, but more importantly, because you have to wonder at the sobriety of anyone who advocates winding up the Iranians by seizing hostages!

Elsewhere, of course, sobriety appears to prevail in sufficient quantities to reinforce my suspicion that a U.S.-Iran war remains unlikely. When the chips are down, it seems, Iran’s pragmatic national security adviser Ali Larijani appears to have more sway over the decision making than does the more hot-headed President Ahmedinajad. Larijani is a tough-minded nationalist who will aggressively assert and defend Iran’s interest, but he also knows very clearly when to step back from the brink and find compromises and accomodations to avoid confrontation. Once Iran had sent the message that it could make the U.S. and its allies pay a heavy price for the covert war they’re waging, there was nothing to be gained from escalating the crisis. Besides, Iran came out ahead — Iraq came out more forcefully against the U.S. snatching Iranian personnel on its soil, and its hard to imagine that Britain will support such actions. Indeed, Britain’s handling of the crisis, to the irritation of the Bush Administration hawks, underscored the principle that diplomacy remains the only game in town.

Indeed, the crisis and its resolution has highlighted the growing isolation of the Bush Administration in shaping events in the Middle East. President Bush was relegated to grumbling on the sidelines about the “inexcusable” Iranian action, and warning that there would be no, uh, quid-pro-quo. London’s response showed no appetite for confrontation. And while Syria and Turkey weighed in to help Britain coax Iran into a deal, Iraq directed its efforts at Washington, pressing for the release of Iranians captured on its soil — and, presumably, making clear that it won’t sanction the U.S. seizing Iranian personnel in Iraqi territory. (Not that the U.S. will necessarily refrain, but it removes the fig leaf of claiming that these activities are designed to protect Iraq.) Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi has defied Bush and gone off to chat with Damascus, and her Senate counterpart, Harry Reid, is warning Bush that there’ll be no money for an open-ended war in Iraq.

Of course, the U.S. will look to escalate pressure on Iran in the hope of getting it to back down on uranium enrichment. But events of the past two weeks may have underscored that the other key stakeholders (on both sides) see diplomacy — and quid-pro-quo — as the way to go.

Not now, Condi, we’re busy

I’ve marveled for some time now at the abundance of unmistakable evidence to the contrary, so much of the mainstream media in the U.S. appears to feel dutybound to parrot Condi Rice’s giddy fantasies about processes underway in the Middle East, and her Administration’s central role in shaping them. For months now we’ve been fed this pile of manure about the U.S. orchestrating a “realignment” in the region, with moderate Sunni Arab states joining with the U.S. and Israel to isolate and confront Iran, Hamas and others Washington dubs “extremists.” Then, last week, as she set out on her umpteenth “Looking Busy” tour of the region, we were served up grand accounts of how Condi was choreographing a complex diplomatic dance aimed at reving the “peace process” (a word that, like “gold standard”, has survived in the media’s lexicon despite the institutions and practises it describes having long passed from the scene).

I wrote on this at length this week at the excellent web jounral TomDispatch (thanks for having me, Tom!), measuring the spin transmitted by mainstream news outlets against the real processes occurring in the region. And wondering why Washington-based correspondents seem to take Condi’s fantasy narrative a lot more seriously than their counterparts in Israel and the Arab world.

But as the week wore on, it became blatantly obvious that Rice’s efforts, and her perspective, are largely irrelevant to events now unfolding, and what much of the media appears reluctant to tell its readers — perhaps for fear of offending Condi and her handlers? — is that even those Arab leaders considered closest to the U.S. have taken to ignoring the advice and injunctions of the Secretary of State and the Administration she represents.

The bubble finally burst in Riyadh this week, when King Abdullah — who has already blatantly ignored failed U.S. policies of trying to isolate both, by engaging extensively with the Iranians on regional tensions in Lebanon and elsewhere, and by brokering a Palestinian unity government that put President Mahmoud Abbas into a power sharing arrangement with Hamas, against the express wishes of the Bush Administration — rhetorically slapped down the U.S. occupation of Iraq, calling it illegal, and also demanding an end to the U.S. led financial siege of the Palestinian Authority.

It was left to the Middle East-based correspondents of many of the major outlets to explain to their readers what had happened. My friend Scott MacLeod at TIME noted that “the Saudis, along with the other Arab states, have concluded that Washington’s policies are neither wise, effective, or in long-term Arab interests, and they are signaling their intent to take greater control over their own destiny.” Hassan Fattah of the New York Times explained that Abdullah was slapping down Rice’s hopelessly naive hard line on the Palestinians, and demanding that if Washington is serious about pushing a Mideast peace program, it had better start putting pressure on Israel to talk peace with the Palestinians rather than demanding that the Arabs jump through more hoops.

What’s interesting about the sudden public break from Washington and assertion of political independence by the “Arab moderates” that were supposedly the vanguard of Bush Administration Middle East policy Version 7.4, is that it is a profound vote of no-confidence in U.S. policy. The Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians could simply no longer sit back and watch the U.S. wreaking havoc throughout the region, because the resulting catastrophe would sweep away their regimes, too. It was as if Abdullah had given George W. Bush five years to pursue his fantasy of remaking the region through force, and now had to call time on the Bush era before it was too late for his own regime.

As I wrote in the Tom Dispatch piece:

Rather than a patient plan crafted by the U.S. Secretary of State as some miraculous alchemist of grand strategy, the latest flurry of activity reflects the maturing of a range of crises in the Middle East that have festered dangerously, while Condi fiddled. These include:

* The fact that the Bush administration has only exerted itself — and then just symbolically — on the Israeli-Palestinian front when it was desperate for favors from allied Arab regimes on other fronts, notably the roiling crises in Iraq and Iran. With the U.S. struggling unsuccessfully on both fronts, its vaunted ability to influence events in the region is in precipitous decline.

* The fact that the Arab regimes most closely allied to the U.S. face mounting crises of legitimacy at home, damned not only by their authoritarianism, but also by their paralysis in the face of U.S. and Israeli violence against Arab populations. Delivering the Palestinians to statehood is now seen by those regimes as essential to their own domestic political survival.

* The fact that an Israeli government, which came to power promising peace through unilateral “disengagement” from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, having fought a disastrous war in Lebanon and facing a never-ending struggle in Gaza, is seemingly disengaged from itself, its policies in tatters. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is drowning in a sea of corruption, scandals, and recriminations over the strategic and tactical incompetence he demonstrated in last summer’s Lebanon war. With his own approval ratings at an astonishing 3%, he desperately needs a new idea to persuade Israeli voters that there’s any reason to keep him in office.

* The fact that the Palestinians are experiencing an unprecedented humanitarian and political breakdown. All factions of the Palestinian government share an overwhelming incentive to get the financial siege lifted from battered, strife-torn Gaza. President Abbas’ political future and legacy rest solely on completing the Oslo peace process; while for Hamas — at least for its more pragmatic political leadership — allowing President Abbas to pursue that course (particularly when it carries pan-Arab blessing) makes a certain sense. Hamas’s political choices have always reflected a keen sense of Palestinian popular sentiment. By maintaining a distant and ambiguous stance towards Abbas’s diplomatic efforts, it can plausibly deny complicity if the outcome proves unpopular on the Palestinian street.

But in order for this process to go anywhere, the crucial component is for the U.S. to accept a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders as outlikned in the Arab peace plan. The problem is not only that the current Israeli government has shown no inclination to do so (Olmert, after all, is the inheritor of Sharon, and the vision of unilateral “disengagement” that left Israel in control of much of the key land captured in 1967), but also that President Bush himself has shown no inclination to do so either. As Ron Suskind has reported, President Bush came to power announcing a tilt back to Israel inside the Administration’s policy chambers, and bluntly backing Sharon’s efforts to find a military solution thte Intifadah.

Frankly, though, it’s not only Bush. So powerful is the grip of AIPAC on mainstream of both parties that it’s hard to imagine any U.S. government for the foreseeable future pressing Israel into territorial compromise. And it’s equally hard to imagine Israel getting there on its own, the fracturing of its own political system in a way that will always give right-wing nationalists a veto power (that is, when they’re not in command, which is the more likely outcome).

My own view is that if the solution to the conflict is to be a two-state one, the only basis for achieving that will be if it is imposed as a matter of international law — which, of course, is the same mechanism by which Israel was created, although its borders were never settled. But that’s a matter for another post. Meanwhile, don’t expect too much from the current diplomatic flurry — the regimes at the center of it are too weak politically to make it happen. And that’s in no small part because of the disastrous drift in U.S. Mideast policy over the past six years. The Saudis have got the right idea about the failures of the Bush Administration; and they’ve recognized that its failures in Iraq and its domestic political lame-duck status have left it politically enfeebled. Riyadh has just chosen to act on it way too late.

Update:

I wrote the following in a piece earlier today on TIME.com:

But the outcome of the standoff may well depend on the strategic calculations of the Iranian leadership. Seizing the British troops a day before the U.N. Security Council voted on sanctions against Iran over the nuclear standoff was widely interpreted as Iran sending a none-too-subtle reminder of its capacity for disruption at the epicenter for the global oil economy. Oil markets certainly took the hint, with prices scooting up to their highest this year on Friday following news of the Iranian action.

But a number of Middle East analysts have also suggested that Iran may be intending to use the British personnel as a bargaining chip to seek the release of a number of Iranian officials currently being held by the U.S. inside Iraq. If so, that might prove to be a reckless gamble, precisely because the Bush Administration has demonstrated a far greater appetite for confrontation with Iran — as suggested by the capture of Iranian operatives in Iraq in the first place.

Those within the Iranian leadership advocating caution and pragmatism would point not only to the dangers of provoking the West, but also to a relatively positive diplomatic outlook: The new U.N. sanctions are only a mild intensification of those previously adopted, and the debate over them revealed important rifts — not only are key players such as Russia, China and the EU reluctant to dramatically increase sanctions and eager to return to negotiations with Iran, but key players in the developing world such as South Africa and India have more aggressively stressed Iran’s right to nuclear energy. So even as Russia reportedly squeezes the Iranians by delaying the delivery of fuel to the Bushehr nuclear reactor — although both sides insist this is simply a dispute over payment — Moscow seeks a diplomatic compromise rather than a gradual escalation of sanctions.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the national security council on whose counsel he relies on such issues, face an important judgment call. The outcome of the standoff over the British marines may be largely determined by whether the voices of pragmatic accommodation prevail over those of confrontation in Iran’s chambers of power. And that, in turn, may well determine whether the nuclear standoff is to be resolved without confrontation.

I agree with the points made by Bernard Chazelle in the comments below, particularly his insights on Britain’s dependence on the Iranians now that they’re withdrawing from southern Iraq. Still, I’d suggest that prolonging the crisis would play into the hands of the U.S. hawks, even though the Brits have no interest in confrontation.

(Update ends).

The response to Iran’s capture of 15 British soldiers in the contested waters between Iran and Iraq will be an important indicator of the likelihood of a U.S. war with Iran. And right now, I’d say it suggests that U.S. military action against Iran remains unlikely, although far from impossible.

For those pushing for war, the incident certainly offers a crisis worth exploiting in the hope of ratcheting up the appetite for confrontation on both sides. U.S. officials certainly rushed to tell anyone who would listen that this was some sort of provocation by that rogue Iranian Revolutionary Guard that is also causing all that trouble in Iraq, and Lebanon, and so on. The same line was taken by the Saudi paper Asharq al-Awsat, which argued that it had been planned in advance by the Revolutionary Guards and the supposedly mysterious Quds brigade to capture the Brits as bargaining chips to seek the freedom of Iranians held by the U.S. inside Iraq.

But the temperature of statements coming out of Britain suggest otherwise. The Brits have insisted all along that they were most certainly in Iraqi waters, although they initially conceded that the Iranians may not see it that way — after all, this happened in 2004, and the British personnel were returned after three days of starring in Iranian propaganda newscasts. While Tony Blair toughened his talk Sunday, insisting that there was no mistake, the Foreign Office Minister Lord Triesman kept a diplomatic tone, noting “These things are always very difficult. They are delicate discussions. My belief is that they will come to a good outcome, but you can never be certain.”

Britain has long made clear its opposition to military action against Iran, essentially taking the option “off the table” while the U.S. continues to insist that it’s still “on the table.” If these troops had been American, the drums of war would have reached a crescendo.

The timing of the incident may well have coincided with the UN Security Council move to slightly increase the level of sanctions against Iran, in which context it could be read as a message warning of Iran’s capacity for disruption. The extent to which Iran’s leadership, or even a faction of that leadership, are intending to use this issue in this way will be measured by the duration of the crisis: If the Iranians return the Brits after a couple of days, as they did in 2004, that will signal an intent in Tehran to avoid ratcheting up a confrontation with the West. If the standoff is drawn out, it will signal a readiness on Tehran’s part to push confrontation to another level, confident that it can prevail.(That, of course, would be an extremely reckless gamble, under present circumstances.) But the capture of the soldiers may just as easily prove to be based on a mistake as to where Iraqi waters ended and Iranian waters began, as the British officer in charge of the operation suggested. Although Britain insists its troops were in Iraqi waters and Iran says they weren’t, Iraqi officials seem to be disputing the British claim. Update: Iraq on Monday formally backed the British position and urged Tehran to release the captive Brits.

More likely, it may be a jab aimed at showing a tough face in response to mounting U.S. pressure.

Much will depend on the actions of both sides in the coming days. Thus far, the temperature of reaction in the West suggests little appetite for confrontation. Indeed, despite passing a mild increase in sanctions over the nuclear issue, the Europeans and the rest of the international community are pushing hard for a return to negotiations with Iran, in search of a grand bargain on the nuclear issue. But should the Iranians, perhaps motivated by domestic balance of power considerations, resort to grandstanding demagoguery — by, say, carrying through on their threat to put the captured Brits on trial — they would be playing into the hands of Dick Cheney and the party of war.

Like Lord Triesman, I think the standoff over the captured troops will have a good outcome, but, as he says, that’s far from certain right now.

Kudos to David Rieff for making clear that all the retrospective posturing on Iraq by the Democrat frontrunners is meaningless — safe, even — and is made nonsense of by the fact that all of them hold positions on Iran which would enable another disastrous war. To the extent that they still maintain the conceptual framework that holds that where America senses a country might be putting itself in a position to attain unconventional weapons capability, it claims that sense as giving it the right to launch a military attack on such a country, they are every bit as responsible for the Iraq debacle as President Bush is. And as Zbigniew Brezinski, one of the few voices in the foreign policy establishment willing to speak uncomfortable truths, noted in Sunday’s Washington Post, it’s time to challenge the whole myth of a “war on terror” that has been used by the most scurrilous element in Washington to wreak havoc abroad and at home. Like Dr. Johnson (thanks Dave!) once said about patriotism, the “war on terror” has become a last refuge of scoundrels.

It’s all very well for Obama to point out that Hillary’s just a status-quo drone when it comes to wars in the Middle East; what we need to know, Barack, is whether you’re much different.