In a move that has sent tremors through the chintz-upholstered corridors of Whitehall, the United Nations' chief atomic bean-counter has announced he will be personally poking his Geiger counter into Iran's most sensitive spots. Yes, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a man whose job description essentially reads 'professional party-pooper for nations with fissile ambitions,' is off to inspect a handful of Iranian sites under the terms of what diplomats are calling a 'war deal.' This is a phrase that, when uttered by a British intelligence official, sounds less like a peace accord and more like a dare from a barroom brawler who has just downed a pint of vitriol.
Let us parse this delicate minuet of statecraft. Iran, a nation whose leadership has the charming habit of denying the Holocaust while simultaneously threatening to wipe another member of the United Nations off the map, has graciously agreed to let a balding Austrian in a safari suit wander through its nuclear labyrinth. In return, the West has agreed to something that sounds suspiciously like 'not bombing the place into a radioactive parking lot for a few more months.' This is diplomacy, British style: a stiff upper lip plastered over a quivering lower one, all while peering through a monocle at a map of the Middle East drawn by a drunken cartographer in 1916.
Meanwhile, His Majesty's intelligence services have been spotted lurking around the water coolers of power, clutching manila folders marked 'FOR EYES ONLY' and looking terribly grave. They are 'monitoring the situation,' which as any aficionado of the spy game knows, means drinking bad coffee, squinting at satellite images of what might be a centrifuge or might be a particularly ornate water feature, and occasionally sending a memo to the Foreign Office marked 'URGENT: STILL NO IDEA WHAT'S GOING ON.'
But let us not be too cynical. After all, the British establishment adores a good inspection. It reminds them of boarding school, where prefects would peer into your locker for contraband. The only difference now is that the contraband is enriched uranium and the prefect carries a diplomatic passport. The Iranians, for their part, are masters of the theatrical shuffle. They will show the inspector rooms full of centrifuges spinning peacefully, while around the corner, in a broom cupboard guarded by a teenage revolutionary, a parallel program hums along merrily. It is a dance as old as the Non-Proliferation Treaty itself.
And what of the war deal? This is the truly absurd bit. Because, you see, we are at peace with Iran. Sort of. In the sense that two drunks waving bottles at each other from across a pub are not yet throwing punches. The 'war deal' is merely an agreement to postpone the inevitable brawl until after the next election, or the next cricket Test match, or until the Foreign Secretary has finished his holiday in Tuscany. It is a ceasefire of convenience, brokered by men whose ultimate weapon is not a cruise missile but a press release.
The British public, of course, is expected to take all of this very seriously. We are to nod gravely as the newsreader intones about 'inspections' and 'monitoring' and 'compliance.' We are to forget that the last inspection regime ended with a former weapons inspector claiming that Iraq could launch chemical weapons in 45 minutes, a fiction that launched a thousand bombs. But now the inspectors are back, and this time it's different, they say. This time there are cameras and seals and a hotline to the Security Council. This time, one suspects, there is also a large bottle of gin in the inspector's luggage, for those moments when the reality of the job becomes too much to bear without pharmaceutical assistance.
So raise a glass, British taxpayers, to your spies and your diplomats and your overworked civil servants. They are out there, on the front lines of global absurdity, ensuring that at the very least, the next war will be postponed until after the football season. Cheers.
