LONDON (NANA-Kemnews) — The men who inhabit the large, gloomy building opposite the House in Downing Street of Britain’s prime minister — the building so inappropriately called the Foreign Office, for there could be none whose spirit and architecture are more intensely British — are not given to the display of strong emotion.

For the Foreign Office, even in this democratic age, is a last resort of Britain’s upper class, the people who wear neatly tailored suits and derby hats, who carry umbrellas as slim and straight as rapiers, and who consider it rank bad form to show emotion.

DURING THE last few days, the occupants of one part of the building, however, have shown a great deal of emotion. They are — to use a phrase which they themselves never would dream of using — “hopping mad.”

These are the people who, for the last few months, have been trying to negotiate with Iran’s premier, Mohammed Mossadegh, and, it must be admitted, they have a good deal to be mad about.

It is not enough, apparently, that they have had to put up with every kind of insult and abuse without once hitting back; it is not enough that, to please the U.S. government, they offered Mossadegh terms which leaned over backward to meet his point of view and which he rejected out of hand and without consideration.

NOW THE U.S. government wants to try again, under certain conditions. When President Truman and Prime Minister Winston Churchill addressed their appeal to Mossadegh and offered him extremely generous terms, Whitehall felt that this really was the last chance. If Mossadegh refused, then even the U.S.A. must be convinced that the man was beyond the reach of reason.

The U.S. even might fall in with the British view that the only thing to do was to leave him to stew in Iran’s economic and financial mess for a bit, when he might realize that there are things worse than a foreign oil company in his territory.

APPARENTLY, the Americans are pretty fed up with the doctor, but they are not prepared, as the British have been for some time, to tell the silly old man exactly where he can go, then wait for him to come to his senses. So, as one of the Foreign Office staff said, “I suppose we shall keep on trying.” Mossadegh’s latest proposal for arbitration by the permanent Court of International Justice at the Hague offers some encouragement.

Why does the U.S.A. persist in the face of Mossadegh’s manoeuvres? They must realize now that there is little hope of a reasonable settlement, but they are obsessed with a fear that Mossadegh has been cultivating assiduously that Iran will go Communist.

HERE, THEN, is the divergence between the British and U.S. points of view. It is worth while looking at the two cases:

The U.S. case is that Mossadegh is what he has so often proclaimed himself to be — the last barrier in Iran against communism. If he falls because of the country’s precarious economic position, then the way would be open for the Communists, and a Communist Iran would mean a Communist Middle East, which would be about the greatest disaster that could befall the free world short of a world war. However unrewarding it is to negotiate with Mossadegh, then, they must go on trying.

THE BRITISH answer is that the Russians could take over Iran tomorrow and Mossadegh would be as powerless to slop them as a paper bag against a bullet, but that would mean military action by Russian troops, which inevitably would lead to war, and all the evidence is that Stalin does not want a war just now.

The argument could go on forever — and looks like doing so. The truth seems to lie somewhere between British optimism and U.S. pessimism, and the correct course of action probably is a modification of the British one — to make the new proposal a basis for discussion, but to say to Mossadegh that it is only on that basis that we are prepared to talk at all.