Iran's seizure of ten US sailors on board two high-speed patrol vessels fits the pattern of brinkmanship bordering on contempt that Tehran continues to display toward the international community. Details of how the two American craft found themselves in Iranian waters remain unclear - Washington said that the second craft had gone to the aid of the first after it had encountered mechanical difficulties on a voyage between Kuwait and Bahrain. But the timing of the incident could hardly have been more significant. Barack Obama was about to make his last presidential State of the Union address while the House of Representatives was preparing to consider a bill demanding sanctions linked to illegal Iranian missile tests last December, provocatively close to US warships. Even as it is awaiting the start of the removal of sanctions under the P5+1 deal agreed in Geneva last summer, the Iranian regime is full of defiance and braggadocio. It is claiming that it has met one of the conditions of the sanctions-lifting deal by removing the core of its Arak heavy water nuclear reactor and filling it with cement. This has, however, yet to be verified by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Indeed, nothing that Iran's current leadership says can be taken on trust. Washington is reported to have apologized for the incursion into waters around Farsi island in the middle of the Gulf. Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has assured US Secretary of State John Kerry that the ten sailors, one of them female, would soon be released. Yet he must have known that such a promise carried a risk, since the island is an operational base for naval units of the hardline Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Insisting that they are directly accountable to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the IRG are a law unto themselves. They are once again reveling in the opportunity to humiliate the United States, certain in the knowledge that a weak president Obama will not want to jeopardize his one big foreign policy achievement - the apparent nuclear de-weaponizing of Iran. The extent to which Obama and his team have become mesmerized by the swaying head of the Iranian cobra is truly alarming. It is still not too late to draw back from the removal of sanctions, which once lifted will be hard to reimpose. US legislators, no longer simply just Republicans, are waking up to the wider risks of a financially re-empowered Iranian regime. Looking at Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, they see that blatant Iranian support for terrorism has brought death, destruction and massive instability. It really is time to call a halt to this exceedingly ill-judged nuclear deal. Moreover, it ought by now to have dawned on somebody in the Obama administration that avoiding a confrontation now that would force Tehran to abandon its support for terrorism is only postponing the day when resolute action will finally have to be taken. The costs of that delay will be high. They will be paid in the Arab world as Tehran redoubles its attempts at devilish destabilization throughout the region. But they will ultimately also be paid by the US and its allies, because the Iran that they will have to bring back into line will be richer and better armed and resourced thanks to the premature lifting of sanctions.
