There is now an unhappy irony besetting the Bush administration’s involvement in the Middle East. It went to war in Iraq, which turned out not to be producing the feared nuclear weapon. Now it is probably not going to war in Iran, which almost certainly is intent on producing the feared nuclear weapon. Thus the Israelis, who have long argued that Iran is more dangerous than Iraq, can uneasily claim credit for being right.

The question now is what the US should do about Iran. There is a lot of talk about the lessons America can learn from the recent capture, imprisonment, psychological pressuring, and ultimate freeing of 15 British marines and sailors by a smiling, handshaking Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I am sure while all this was going on, Britain’s Special Air Service soldiers stationed near Hereford, England, veterans of many derring-do missions that may never be told, were raring to mount a rescue operation. It would have been a tough one, as Americans found out in their costly, failed helicopter mission years before to rescue their soldiers held hostage in the US embassy. But though British PM Tony Blair warned darkly of other measures if diplomacy failed, diplomacy it was, perhaps with sticks and carrots unknown to us, that the British employed to bring home their men and one woman.

In Washington, Britain’s handling of the situation was closely watched, and has not ended the debate within the Bush administration of how best to get Iran to mend its unconscionable ways. Though President Bush prudently says that everything is on the table, military force cannot seriously be under consideration. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, who has brought realism and good sense to the Pentagon, says it is not.

The US military is strained to its limits in Iraq. A fair amount of goodwill toward the US among young Iranians would turn instantly to anti-American fervour if America bombed or invaded. And if the post-war occupation of Iraq has been messy, it could be a nightmare in Iran. So diplomacy and multilateral pressure through the EU and the UN remains the Bush administration’s course. Diplomacy can be firm, and the US should continue its campaign to thwart Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons (a quest that Tehran, of course, denies). If it is not yet already abundantly clear to Ahmadinejad, who sometimes lives in a world of make-believe, the Iranian leadership should be left in no doubt about the awesome consequences of an Iranian-developed nuclear weapon being used by them or their surrogates against the US or its allies.

Whether Iran’s capture of the British servicemen was carefully planned as a Machiavellian taunting of the West or was just one of those spontaneous incidents that sometimes propel surprised nations into confrontation, a shooting war was avoided. While Iran’s leadership often seems mysterious and its actions unfathomable, diplomacy can sometimes trump machismo. — The Christian Science Monitor