A Target of Convenience
by Michael
Rubin
National Review Online
April 21, 2009
http://www.meforum.org/2125/a-target-of-convenience
On April 13, Roxana Saberi, a 31-year-old Iranian-American
journalist, appeared before a closed hearing of a revolutionary court to
answer charges of spying for the United States — potentially capital
charges. Iranian officials brushed off Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton's request for Saberi to be released. Iranian justice was quick. On
April 18, the court found Saberi guilty and sentenced her to eight years.
Her case calls to mind that of Farzad Bazoft, a Western journalist
executed by Saddam Hussein in 1990. It is worthwhile to reflect on the two
cases, and to ask how the West might avoid repeating with Iran today the
mistakes it made with Hussein almost two decades ago.
The charges against Saberi are spurious; she was a target of
convenience, arrested to make a diplomatic statement. Since 2003, Saberi
has worked as a freelance journalist, reporting for the BBC, Fox, and
NPR.
Most Western journalists working in the Islamic Republic
self-censor to maintain access. The Ministries of Information, Foreign
Affairs, and Culture and Islamic Guidance monitor foreign reports and
blacklist any journalist who files reports not to the liking of Iranian
authorities. Visas to Iran are a rare commodity, even for non-journalists,
and the visas of critical reporters are not
renewed and sometimes revoked.
Some Iranian Americans, like Saberi, get around the visa
controls by traveling on Iranian passports. This carries risks, however.
"She entered the country as an Iranian citizen and holds Iranian
residency, passport and national identity card. Even if she has another
citizenship, it will not affect the way we will proceed with her case,"
her prosecutor, Hassan Haddad, said.
U.S. officials have expressed displeasure with the arrest,
but there is every reason to believe the Iranians do not take them
seriously. Addressing Washington, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
told an April 15 campaign rally in the southern Iranian city of Kerman,
"You today are in a position of weakness and you can't achieve
anything."
Saberi's fate is in the air. Robert Mackey, a blogger for
the New York Times, speculated
that Iranian authorities view Saberi as a hostage, a bargaining chip to
win the release of alleged Qods Force operatives seized by U.S. forces in
Iraq. This is plausible. But for Obama, such bargaining would be a
dangerous game to play.
First, it is not wise to equate an innocent American
journalist with Iranian special-force operatives working to kill American
soldiers and Iraqi civilians. And while some proponents of engagement
argue that, however odious, prisoner swaps work, experience suggests
otherwise. Between 1984 and 1992, terrorists — most linked to Hezbollah —
kidnapped 24 Americans. They killed several, most famously former CIA
station chief William Francis Buckley (no relation to the founder of
National Review) and U.S. Marine colonel William R. Higgins, who
had been snatched while on a U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. Most of
the captives were left to languish, however. And when Reagan tried to
trade arms for hostages, the lull in kidnappings lasted only until his
administration supplied the last shipment of military spare parts; then
the terrorists seized three more Americans.
There is a more dangerous scenario. Throughout the 1980s,
foreign-policy "realists" in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush
administrations, as well as a bipartisan array of congressmen and
senators, sought to engage Saddam Hussein, calling the Iraqi president a
moderate and a bulwark against Islamism. A Western consensus that Saddam
was dangerous developed only in 1990, two years after the Iraqi
leader had ordered the chemical-weapons bombardment of Halabja and other
Iraqi Kurdish towns and villages The incident that convinced Western
officials was the Iraqi regime's execution of journalist Farzad Bazoft;
this led U.S. News & World Report to run a portrait of Hussein
on its cover with the caption "The Most Dangerous Man in the World."
The similarities between Bazoft and Saberi are
uncomfortable. Bazoft also was 31 years old. Though a naturalized British
citizen, he was of Iranian heritage. Ambitious and adventurous, he too
established himself as a freelancer, working in Iraq for the
Observer, the Sunday edition of the Guardian.
Iraqi security arrested Bazoft in September 1989 as he
investigated reports of an explosion at an Iraqi military facility south
of Baghdad. As Iranian authorities did with Saberi, Iraqi officials held
Bazoft for several months before trial. On March 10, 1990, after a trial
also closed to outside observers, the Iraqi court found Bazoft guilty of
espionage. On March 15, Iraqi authorities led Bazoft to the gallows and
hanged him.
In language similar to that of the Iranian authorities
today, Iraqi authorities said they were refusing to compromise because —
as the Iraqi ambassador to France put it — Western officials had used
"threatening terms and blackmail," and were insufficiently respectful of
Saddam Hussein. On March 26, 1990, the Arab League expressed "its complete
solidarity with Iraq in the defense of its sovereignty and national
security." While the U.S. Foreign Office ordered its ambassador home for
consultations, British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd declined to send the
Iraqi ambassador home or sever relations. In 2003, after U.S. and British
troops occupied Iraq, the Observer investigated the Bazoft case. It
tracked down Bazoft's interrogator, who acknowledged that Bazoft
was no spy, and said the execution took place on Saddam's orders.
Saberi no longer faces the gallows, but it is not uncommon
for detainees to die of unnatural causes in Iranian custody. Just ask the
family of photographer Zahra Kazemi, who was raped and beaten to death
after her arrest in 2003.
Once, the world bent over backward not to recognize Saddam
Hussein for what he was; today, many foreign-policy and intellectual
elites try to explain away Iranian actions.
Just as the Arab League rallied around Iraq and against the
West between Bazoft's execution and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait four months
later, today the Organization of the Islamic Conference and other
international bodies rally around Iran. International organizations are
fickle,and seldom adhere to their founding principles.
It is not possible to erase the noxiousness of rogue states
with rhetorical flourish. In 1990, it took the death of a 31-year-old
journalist to wake up the West. Let's hope we needn't make the same
sacrifice today.
Michael
Rubin, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, is a
resident scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute and a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate
School.
Related Topics: Iran, Media | 
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