Saturday the French ambassador to the United States Gerard Araud downplayed the attacks on Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic facilities in Iran. Following the execution of controversial Saudi Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr, Iranian mobs surely backed by the clerical regime set fire to the Saudi embassy in Tehran, and the kingdom’s consulate in Iran’s second-largest city, Mashad. In response to the destruction of diplomatic missions, the chief of France’s diplomatic mission in Washington wrote that “Iran was obliged to react. Burning an embassy is spectacular but not war.”
Araud articulated his bizarrely obtuse thesis during a Twitter exchange with Omri Ceren, the managing director for press at the Israel Project. Ceren responded by citing an opinion from the International Court of Justice holding that, “there is ‘no more fundamental prerequisite’ for interstate relations than protecting embassies.” Violating diplomatic immunity, Ceren continued, is the “single most corrosive thing you can do. More corrosive than war because war is governed by rules.”
Araud has recently shown a pattern of rationalizing Iranian belligerency. In a previous exchange with Ceren, Araud described an Iranian ballistic missile test as “posturing.” According to the French diplomat, Iran is “a rational country we should handle with firmness and rationally.” Fine, but if, as Araud contends, Iran is rational, then it should rationally understand that when a mob controlled by an authoritarian state is incited or directed to attack an embassy the action might well warrant a response more firm than a Baudrillardian tweet like that authored by Araud.
Indeed, there’s serious testimony arguing that the violation of diplomatic missions should be regarded as something rather more than a post-modernist happening. In February 1980, veteran American diplomat George Kennan told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that because of the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran, “our Government [should] simply acknowledge the existence of the state of hostility brought about by the behavior of the Iranian Government, and, having done that, then regard ourselves as at war with that country.” In other words, torching an embassy might be more than spectacular—it might indeed be an act of war.
As Ceren argued in his exchange with Araud, the diplomacy prized by the international order cannot be conducted without protecting the sanctity of embassies. It seems that Araud was later given access to the same conclusion, perhaps helped by his bosses at the French foreign ministry. Hence Araud later deleted his tweet, and replaced it with the statement that “Burning any embassy, whatever the pretext, is unacceptable. A gross violation of international law.”
Good for him, who eventually came to see the problematic aporia embedded in the margins of the ineluctable Derridean irony of an ambassador justifying the deconstruction of an embassy. However, shortly after retracting his initial tweet, Araud defended it, describing his first effort as “analysis” of the attack on the embassy, and not a “judgment” of the action. “Strange,” wrote Araud, “how many people confuse analysis of an action with justification of an action.”
In this case of course the analysis does in fact justify the action. Araud, like other diplomats, is no doubt well aware that the Islamic Republic regularly targets diplomats and embassies as a matter of course. Indeed, the regime at its very inception invaded the American embassy in 1979 and held 52 Americans, including diplomats, for 444 days. The Khomeinst regime, via Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed groups, also attacked American embassies in Kuwait in 1983, and Lebanon in the same year, killing 63, including 17 U.S. citizens. The Islamic Republic has also targeted Araud’s countrymen, citizens, soldiers, as well as diplomats, for more than three decades, largely inside Lebanon. Among other recent plots against diplomatic personnel, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeted Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States in Washington, D.C. in 2011.
It seems that Araud, recognizing Tehran’s record of violence against diplomats and diplomatic missions, was simply acknowledging that this is how the clerical regime typically operates—by violating the international community’s diplomatic norms. Araud’s elaboration of his initial diplomatic gaffe only underscores the fundamental problem of the international order, whether it is Paris, Washington or wherever. From Araud to John Kerry, they all comprehend the nature of the ruling clique in Tehran. Thus the issue, contrary to Araud’s fine distinction, is neither about analysis nor judgment. Rather, it is about policy, it is about action, it is about the fact that for 36 years no one has done anything to stop a regime that acts outside all international norms from waging terrorist attacks against citizens, soldiers, and of course diplomats. In effect, Araud was simply paraphrasing the famous words of the Islamic Republic’s founding father—the international order can’t do a damn thing.
