I haven’t written about the British hostages been held in Iran at all as yet: the main reason for that is that while I have enormous sympathy on a personal level for the hostages, some of whom are from my home town, (and especially for the one woman hostage Fay Turney, having been a female member of the UK armed forces myself) nevertheless, on the strategic level I can only agree with Ronan Bennett in this morning’s Guardian:
Turney may have been “forced to wear the hijab”, as the Daily Mail noted with fury, but so far as we know she has not been forced into an orange jumpsuit. Her comrades have not been shackled, blindfolded, forced into excruciating physical contortions for long periods, or denied liquids and food. As far as we know they have not had the Bible spat on, torn up or urinated on in front of their faces. They have not had electrodes attached to their genitals or been set on by attack dogs.
They have not been hung from a forklift truck and photographed for the amusement of their captors. They have not been pictured naked and smeared in their own excrement. They have not been bundled into a CIA-chartered plane and secretly “rendered” to a basement prison in a country where torturers are experienced and free to do their worst.
As far as we know, Turney and her comrades are not being “worked hard”, the euphemism coined by one senior British army officer for the abuse of prisoners at Camp Bread Basket. And as far as we know all 15 are alive and well, which is more than can be said for Baha Mousa, the hotel receptionist who, in 2003, was unfortunate enough to have been taken into custody by British troops in Basra. There has of course been a court martial and it exonerated the soldiers of Mousa’s murder. So we can only assume that his death – by beating – was self-inflicted; yet another instance of “asymmetrical warfare”, the description given by US authorities to the deaths of the Guantánamo detainees who hanged themselves last year.
And while the families of the captured marines and sailors must be in agonies of uncertainty, they have the comfort of knowing that the very highest in the land are doing everything they can to end their “unjustified detention”. They can count themselves especially lucky, for the very same highest of the land have rather different views on what justifies detention where foreign-born Muslims in Britain are concerned.
Quite.
As a nation we can hardly go around the world demanding that other countries observe the ‘rules of war’ when we have not done so ourselves.
Because of our actions, because of Iraq, Guantanamo and our continued support of the murderous regime of George Bush our diplomatic and political capital as a nation is virtually nil. We are hoist by our own petard. Pick a cliche – we are a busted flush, clapped out, disgraced, shamed, having our own faces rubbed in our mess…
It hasn’r helped either that our continuing bosom buddies and allies, the USA, recently kidnapped a number of Iranian public servants:
Iranian diplomats are still being held in occupied Iraq after being seized by US forces and by kidnappers wearing the uniforms of elite Iraqi army units.
On the morning of 11 January, US troops stormed the Iranian consulate in Arbil in northern Iraq.
Using stun bombs, they disarmed the guards, then seized five officials – claiming later that they were members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
Iraq’s foreign minister stated that the Iranians had been working in Arbil with the approval of the government. The building where they were seized, he added, was a liaison office, set to become a full consulate.
In February a secretary of the Iranian embassy in Baghdad was seized by gunmen wearing uniforms of the Iraqi 36th Commando Battalion – a special Iraqi unit under US direction.
The kidnapping coincided with George Bush’s allegations that Iran was directly involved in attacks on US forces in Iraq.
When you look past the UK media outrage that British, British I tell you! servicepeople have been illegally detained, it seems we don’t have a lot of moral standing here.
Witness the lacklustre response by the UN security council to our pleas for support. The UK is being treated like spoiled meat, being given a wide berth by the world – and it’s all our own bloody fault.
But it’s not our leaders who pay, once again it’s the poor bloody mutts in the services, who just joined up to defend their country and get a regular paycheque, who suffer.
There are a lot of questions to be asked. How did the Iranians get so close to the naval boat? Didn’t they have a an accompanying attack helicopter and why the hell did it not warn them? Where was its parent ship and its accompanying US warship? Was this a setup of some kind, gone horribly wrong?
It smells. I’m not sure of exactly what just at the moment but I think I detect the faint whiff of the lamp. I hope the British sailors get home safely, but I can’t help feeling this incident is being cultivated as a casus belli for an attack on Iran and I’m horribly afraid they won’t be home any time soon, if ever.
MOSCOW, March 27 (RIA Novosti) – Russian military intelligence services are reporting a flurry of activity by U.S. Armed Forces near Iran’s borders, a high-ranking security source said Tuesday.
“The latest military intelligence data point to heightened U.S. military preparations for both an air and ground operation against Iran,” the official said, adding that the Pentagon has probably not yet made a final decision as to when an attack will be launched.
He said the Pentagon is looking for a way to deliver a strike against Iran “that would enable the Americans to bring the country to its knees at minimal cost.”
He also said the U.S. Naval presence in the Persian Gulf has for the first time in the past four years reached the level that existed shortly before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Col.-Gen. Leonid Ivashov, vice president of the Academy of Geopolitical Sciences, said last week that the Pentagon is planning to deliver a massive air strike on Iran’s military infrastructure in the near future.
A new U.S. carrier battle group has been dispatched to the Gulf.
The USS John C. Stennis, with a crew of 3,200 and around 80 fixed-wing aircraft, including F/A-18 Hornet and Superhornet fighter-bombers, eight support ships and four nuclear submarines are heading for the Gulf, where a similar group led by the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower has been deployed since December 2006.
The U.S. is also sending Patriot anti-missile systems to the region.
But hey, it’s all good for the oil trade. What’s the lives of a few British matlows compared to that?
