Iran Pushes To The Very Brink Of War: Captured British Sailors To Be Tried For Espionage, Which Carries A "Very Severe" Penalty

Genius. All they had to do was play out the clock and let the Europeans indulge in their fantasies about negotiations and diplomacy. But they just couldn't help themselves.

I could run down the Drudge links, but why bother when Allah's already done such a bang-up job?

They seem to have followed through on their threat of taking Western hostages in retalliation for their captured spies/saboteurs/terrorists in Iraq as well as their missing officers. The capture of the British sailors is fairly plainly a set-up, a mission with the precise objective achieved -- waiting for Westerners to put themselves in a position to be captured, and then taking them. Interestingly, the CIA warned Britain of this possibility, but they don't seem to have increased their security in response to it. Blair lied?

It's not clear to me what they hope to achieve from this. Or, rather, it's clear what they hope to achieve; I'm just baffled that they really think they've got enough pimp-hand to be successful at it. Iran has a Navy (um, or "Navy") only because we permit them to. Within two days, should we choose, the entirety of that "navy" will lie thirty fathoms beneath the Persian Gulf.

And we have little choice now but to instruct the Iranians that, due to their act of war and apparent intent to engage in similar acts of war in the future, we are unilaterally restricting their territorial waters to one or one and a half miles from the coast of Iran; any Iranian ship of any sort, even a "civilian" one, spotted outside that zone will be subject to first a shot across the bow and then, should it not move closer to Iran's coast, an actual attack on the ship until it is sunk.

Saber-rattling is really a game for those with the big sabers. Iran doesn't have big sabers; they just believe they're the only ones willing to use them. They're wrong, grievously wrong, and they are embarking on a strategy almost guaranteed to solve many of our foreign policy problems and leave their military, economic, and political infrastructure in smoldering piles.

I would caveat all this now with the typical Assuming Bush isn't a complete appeaser, but I don't think I need to. There is no longer any pretense; there are those who will, of course, claim that Iran is peaceful and just wants to fly kites, but no President, not even a liberal appeaser, can afford to let a hostile enemy nation begin kidnapping its sailors and threatening its battleships.

Iran has played its last trump. It has a certain amount of time to pull that trump back; after that begins the escalation, starting with the sinking of Iran's pitiful Navy and the ravaging of all its military-capable ports.

And then it gets a bit worse for them.

posted by Ace at 09:45 PM

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