The 15 British Navy and Marine sailors who were nabbed in international waters a few weeks ago by the Iranian Navy have returned home, and have been speaking to the press about their ordeal. It's about what you would expect: they were mistreated and forced to give "confessions" of actually having been in Iranian waters, on camera and under threat of execution.
All that is expected, and by the way is against the Geneva Convention. Has the Left mentioned this?
Mostly sitting out the discussion, though (why I do not know), has been criticism of the British Navy in general, and of these sailors in particular, for having been picked up in the first place.
The setup is that they were in international waters and had just finished inspecting a cargo vessel on its way into Iraq. They were in a couple of inflatable boats, 15 sailors in all. They were preparing to return to their "mother" ship when several Iranian gunboats pulled up and surrounded them, demanding their surrender. They then took the sailors back to Iran and used them as political puppets for two weeks, before finally releasing them - while patting themselves on their back for their magnanimous gesture.
The first thing I thought of at the time was, "how in the world did their support vessels allow them to be taken? Where was the commanding officer of the ship from which these inflatables had launched? Did they not see the Iranian vessels approaching on radar?? If not, why not? and if so, why did they not intercept? I thought I heard one British Navy officer indicate that they had, in fact, seen the blips on the radar and warned the boarding party. Outside of that, they obviously took no action.
Now, surrounding and capturing two military boat crews in international waters is technically an act of war, is it not? Does not this kind of a provocation demand a military response at that moment? Why would the smaller-but-capable British Navy (for centuries the greatest navy in the world), even at the risk of 15 of its sailors, not show up to support the boarding parties with overwhelming firepower? They certainly are militarily capable of doing so.
If this had been the U.S. Navy, those sailors would not have been captured, period. In fact, the Iranian boats would likely have been sunk before they reached those crews. There can be no doubt about this.
Now the criticism is focusing on the comments of the young Brit Captain who was presumably in charge of the crew at that time. His comments were fairly pathetic. Basically he/they decided that to fight back against greater numbers of Iranians would have been suicide, so they surrendered. Colonel Jack Jacobs, a military analyst for MSNBC, was incredibly blunt about this:
"Disgusting". He is right.
As it happens, there are two footnotes to this sordid story. The first is that the Brit's have temporarily suspended cargo vessel inspections in that area. That is at least as pathetic as the whole above story. The second footnote is that a new weapon has started being used successfully against coalition tanks and armored carriers. This weapon is called an "EFP" (Explosively Formed Projectile) and it is manufactured in -- Iran. What a coincidence that this new weapon arrives on the scene right after the Iranians successfully shame Britain into stopping cargo vessel searches. "Disgusting" is right; the resolve of the British?
By the way, an article here discusses the behind-the-scenes wrangling in Iran over this event. In the end, the article suggests that many in the Iranian hierarchy heard that the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (and its entourage) was steaming toward the Persian Gulf to join the USS Dwight D Eisenhower and the USS John C. Stennis, bring the total of Carrier Strike Groups in the area to 3, and that they pressured Khatamei to release the British prisoners to ward off an American invasion. If true it would prove, once again, that the only thing rogue regimes like this one understand is force. Big surprise.
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