Correction: US raided proto Iranian consulate

Yesterday, American forces raided what was widely reported to be an Iranian consulate in Northern Iraq. Now the Iraqi foreign minister helpfully re-describes the facility as an Iraqi-government approved liason office that was in the process of becoming a consulate:

The Iranians were detained Thursday as multinational forces entered the building overnight and confiscated computers and documents, two senior local Kurdish officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.

Six people suspected of being involved in attacks against Iraqi civilians and military forces were initially detained, the U.S. military said in a statement. One was later released. The statement did not identify the nationalities of the suspects.

Iraqi and Iranian officials initially said the Iranian office was a diplomatic mission, raising questions about whether those detained had diplomatic immunity. But Zebari told The Associated Press that the Iranians worked at a ''liaison office'' that was in the process of becoming a consulate.

''This office is not new and has been there for more than 10 years,'' he said. ''We are now in the process of changing these offices to consulates and ... we will open consulates in Iran.''

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said the facility was an ''office of relations'' and that it was waiting for permission to operate as a consulate. The U.S. Embassy also said it was assured the building was not a consulate. [NYT]

Iran reached an agreement Iraq to set up a consulate in Arbil last year. According to Iranian state television the Kurdish authorities had already given the office permission to function as a consulate and the facility was in the "final stages of receiving permission from the Iraqi government".

It's awfully convenient that everyone's backing off the "consulate" designation, following an announcement from the Iraqi foreign minister. Attacking another country's consulate is the equivalent of an attack on that country's soil, and therefore an act of war.

Yet, it's also perplexing. Yesterday, everyone was sure it was a consulate: U.S. media, Al Jazeera, Iranian news services...even the head of the Kurdish regional government considered it a consulate.

Backing off the consulate designation is win-win. The prisoners probably don't get diplomatic immunity, so the U.S. gets something. Iran doesn't have to react to the U.S. raid as an act of war, so that's good for everyone. All in all, it's a damned good thing that everyone is now going along with the proto-consulate line.

Looks like everyone just took a small step back from the abyss.

Update: Spencer Ackerman visited that Irbil office last year, and it was called the Iranian consulate then.

Comments

[doyle saylor]

I agree. This is allows time which is not on Bush's side.
Doyle

[TW Andrews]

As an added bonus, the non-consulate designation pisses off the folks who want war with Iran.

[Thom]

I did a post on the story y'day and I didn't include that we're taking someone's word for it that it was a consulate. Wish I had. The army said, also y'day, that it wasn't - who ya gonna believe.

We'll see. The U.S. would have to know, wouldn't they.

[Thom]

U.N., not U.S.

[Paul Hooson]

It is Iran that has had a poor history of respecting the importance of embassy missions as an independent mission that deserves full diplomatic immunity. In New York, two diplomats were expelled for doing intelligence work for Iranian terrorist cells that planned to kill large numbers of American civilians and bomb U.S. landmarks in the event of any U.S. military efforts against Iran.

There was likely enough U.S. intelligence information including from electronic monitoring of phone calls that these Iranian diplomats in Iraq were involved in the covert Iranian attempts to smuggle IEDs into Iraq. This is completely unacceptable behavior for any diplomats to be involved in.

No nation should use their diplomatic missions as a cover for military, terrorist or covert activites. Diplomatic missions should be completely independent of any military goals of a nation. Under any normal circumstance diplomatic missions need to be respected. But any nation using diplomats as a cover for military activities is just not acceptable.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

Kurdish Iraqi officials have said that they are "annoyed" at this, because the Iranian mission had been an established part of the community, and provided services to the people (see the Financial Times, January 12). If Iraqi Kurds are annoyed at us, that's deep. They're the one faction there that loves us.

[Martin Wisse]

Paul, you're not quite with us in the real world, are you?

Before you get all indignant about what Iranian embassy staff may or may not be up to, do read up about what has been happening in Us embassies...

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

Wait a second--I was posting on the fly earlier, and didn't have time to read Paul's post.

Paul:
>In New York, two diplomats were expelled for doing intelligence work

Martin:
>Before you get all indignant about what Iranian embassy staff may or may not be up to, do read up about what has been happening in Us embassies...

Paul. I'm afraid Martin is extremely, exceedingly right about that. It is well known that embassies are almost _always_ cover for intelligence work. In American embassies in important places, there is usually an official CIA liaison officer, often along with several officers undercover. Russian or Chinese embassies or consulates in the US usually have several intelligence agents spying on us. It is more sensitive in Iran's case, of course, because we face imminent danger of war with them, but I don't know that it's clear that Iran is the aggressor in this situation. They were after all cooperating with us against Al Qaeda, as someone mentioned recently, until that stupid Axis of Evil speech let them know they were next.

[Paul Hooson]

Martin and 1984, you both seemed to miss my point that no diplomatic mission should be abused by any nation for military, intelligence or covert operations. This certainly includes the U.S. as well. The Iranians in NY had no business conspiring with terrorist cells to blow up American civilians. That's not a legitimate role of diplomats by any means.

The question of diplomatic immunity then begins to break down when an embassy is not respected for legitimate means. The Iranians in Iraq it turns out were not even legitimate diplomats, but members of the Iranian military. Iran is running out of oil, and hopes to spread the use of IEDs in Iraq, drive up American deaths and force the U.S. to leave, Iran then wants to spread their influence over the oil assets of Iraq. This is nothing sort of Iranian colonalism. If Iran would have won the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980's, you can bet that they would have captured and controlled the oil assets of Iraq as job #1.

Iran doesn't deserve very much sympathy. The country is a rotten state controlled by a strict Islamic council of radical clerics and a screwball as President who thinks that the Holocaust never happened and invites KKK members like David Duke to visit. I can't just find it in myself to find sympathy for those you spread lies about the Holocaust, are sympathetic to persons like David Duke or who constantly talk about wanting to blow up Israel with a nuclear weapon. Iran just isn't a very good country.

The U.S. does use the terrorist MEK for covert missions and intelligence in Iran. But this organization is not connected with any American embassy in Iraq. A low level war has taken place for some time between both the U.S. and Iran. I've written about this numerious times on my blog, www.progressivevalues.blogspot.com

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

>Martin and 1984, you both seemed to miss my point that no diplomatic mission should be abused by any nation for military, intelligence or covert operations.

Not at all. We're simply saying that they're _always_ used for intelligence operations. _Always._ You may feel free to say they "should" not be all you want, but the simple fact is that if all intelligence operations undertaken by diplomatic missions were punished by military strikes, every two nations with a diplomatic mission in one another's country would be at war with each other. All of them.

The question of diplomatic immunity then begins to break down when an embassy is not respected for legitimate means. The Iranians in Iraq it turns out were not even legitimate diplomats, but members of the Iranian military. Iran is running out of oil, and hopes to spread the use of IEDs in Iraq, drive up American deaths and force the U.S. to leave, Iran then wants to spread their influence over the oil assets of Iraq. This is nothing sort of Iranian colonalism. If Iran would have won the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980's, you can bet that they would have captured and controlled the oil assets of Iraq as job #1.

Iran doesn't deserve very much sympathy.

I agree completely that Iran desires to colonize Iraq. I also agree that they don't deserve much sympathy, especially this bigotry that they espouse. My point is that we ought never to have called them part of the Axis of Evil, because before we did that, they were cooperating with us, and we could have gotten them to shut up with the bigoted stuff, I believe, and possibly even to mellow their anti-Israel violence through Hezbollah. Having identified them as the Axis of Evil narrowed our options from diplomatic, economic, financial, public works, and military options, to only military options. This was incredibly stupid. Do you realize that our army is just about equal to theirs in numbers, if we dedicated every single soldier to fighting them? It should be obvious that we _cannot_ fight Iran. Sorry. I wish they weren't in so strong a position, just as you do, and for the same reason (their government is violent, bigoted, and anti-US). But we've narrowed, and are narrowing, our options to only one, the military option, when we are in _no_ position to do s--- against them militarily. We can hurt them, but they'll defeat us. It'll be just like the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. We assume we're the big boys on the block, and that Iran is a pea-picking third world backwater, but this is a horrible mistake we're making. Bush and Rice aren't stopping, either. Hang on to your balls.

[ajay]

The question isn't really "was it a consulate" as much as "were they diplomats?" Diplomats are immune from arrest wherever they are - the only thing you can do is expel them.