Something's Not Right...
There is something about this capture and release of the British marines that just doesn't add up. Al Webb has a piece in the Washington Times about this and the more I read, the more it bugs me. Stuff like this:
The fifteen men and one woman, clad in ill-fitting civilian clothes and laden with bags full of CDs, candy and other gifts from their Iranian captors, flew out of Tehran aboard a British Airways jetliner and landed seven hours later in London en route to a marine base in southwest England.
Bags of CDs, candy, and other gifts from the Iranian captors? Who kidnaps and holds hostage military people from another country and then showers them with gifts?
And this:
As the Times newspaper in London reported, the fifteen "were shown on Iranian television drinking tea and receiving gifts."
"They looked relaxed and smiled as they went through bags of presents, pulling out what looked like black lacquer boxes," the report continued. "They posed for a group shot, and some waved at the cameras."
On the business-class flight back to Britain, the ex-captives laughed and joked. Journalists on board the airliner reported that champagne also flowed, but British military officials said that while they had not been told specifically to lay off the bubbly, they were reminded that they were "still on duty."
Do these sound like people who have been held captive by a hostile nation? What am I missing??
JASmius adds: There are several possibilities. One, the mullahs so completely humiliated the Brits that there was no more propaganda value to be wrung from the exercise. Two, Adolph Ahmadinejad gained all the domestic political capital obtainable from reducing a Western power other than the United States to utter and complete prostration. Three, the British have announced that they'll be conducting no more boarding operations in the Persian Gulf, leaving Iraqi waterways open once more to terrorist infiltration. Four, Tehran may have been delivered a back-channel ultimatum by the Bush Administration to release the fifteen allied sailors and marines, "or else." And, five, most likely it's some combination of all of the above.
I don't blame the captives for concluding that "fighting back was not an option." Or even for being relieved and jazzed after their release, though they really should have been more circumspect about their joy. What concerns me about their Stockholm Syndromesque display is that it is, in the microcosm, what the Western stance is to the Iranian mullahgarchy in the macrocosm - weakness, cowardice, willlessness, and prostration. Just as in the late 1930s, when Hitler's Germany could have had its march toward global war halted in its tracks at a price dwarfed by the one eventually paid for Western inaction, so we are squandering every last opportunity to pre-empt a Middle East war that is likely to plunge the world into nuclear holocaust.
Picture World War II with twenty-first century military technology. The sixty million deaths of six decades ago will pale before the carnage to come. And here we are, paralyzed by the captivity of a mere fifteen.
They're free today, and I suppose that can't be called a bad thing. But that the Iranians felt so little trepidation about seizing them in the first place, and having that arrogant presumption validated, is a whole other story.
The fifteen men and one woman, clad in ill-fitting civilian clothes and laden with bags full of CDs, candy and other gifts from their Iranian captors, flew out of Tehran aboard a British Airways jetliner and landed seven hours later in London en route to a marine base in southwest England.
Bags of CDs, candy, and other gifts from the Iranian captors? Who kidnaps and holds hostage military people from another country and then showers them with gifts?
And this:
As the Times newspaper in London reported, the fifteen "were shown on Iranian television drinking tea and receiving gifts."
"They looked relaxed and smiled as they went through bags of presents, pulling out what looked like black lacquer boxes," the report continued. "They posed for a group shot, and some waved at the cameras."
On the business-class flight back to Britain, the ex-captives laughed and joked. Journalists on board the airliner reported that champagne also flowed, but British military officials said that while they had not been told specifically to lay off the bubbly, they were reminded that they were "still on duty."
Do these sound like people who have been held captive by a hostile nation? What am I missing??
JASmius adds: There are several possibilities. One, the mullahs so completely humiliated the Brits that there was no more propaganda value to be wrung from the exercise. Two, Adolph Ahmadinejad gained all the domestic political capital obtainable from reducing a Western power other than the United States to utter and complete prostration. Three, the British have announced that they'll be conducting no more boarding operations in the Persian Gulf, leaving Iraqi waterways open once more to terrorist infiltration. Four, Tehran may have been delivered a back-channel ultimatum by the Bush Administration to release the fifteen allied sailors and marines, "or else." And, five, most likely it's some combination of all of the above.
I don't blame the captives for concluding that "fighting back was not an option." Or even for being relieved and jazzed after their release, though they really should have been more circumspect about their joy. What concerns me about their Stockholm Syndromesque display is that it is, in the microcosm, what the Western stance is to the Iranian mullahgarchy in the macrocosm - weakness, cowardice, willlessness, and prostration. Just as in the late 1930s, when Hitler's Germany could have had its march toward global war halted in its tracks at a price dwarfed by the one eventually paid for Western inaction, so we are squandering every last opportunity to pre-empt a Middle East war that is likely to plunge the world into nuclear holocaust.
Picture World War II with twenty-first century military technology. The sixty million deaths of six decades ago will pale before the carnage to come. And here we are, paralyzed by the captivity of a mere fifteen.
They're free today, and I suppose that can't be called a bad thing. But that the Iranians felt so little trepidation about seizing them in the first place, and having that arrogant presumption validated, is a whole other story.
posted by Jennifer at 7:14 AM
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