Wellington, Nelson, Churchill Rolling Over In Their Graves

quack, quack
Written by E.J Salisbury
Wednesday, 04 April 2007

Iran is back kidnapping foreigners again. This time, like last time, it is not going to end well.

It is nearly thirty years since the Ayatollah Khomeini's shock troops invaded the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and kidnapped the U.S. diplomats serving there. The saga lasted months and ended with Jimmy Carter's humiliation as the American helicopters crashed in the Iranian desert. The Islamic Republic of Iran was seen for what it was - an outlaw regime, crazed with religious malice, happy to demand sovereign respect from the world but equally happy to disregard the basic international legal norm that protects the physical safety of diplomats. Nothing has changed since then.

In 2007 the British sailors were kidnapped in waters apparently claimed by Iran. A search of the International Court of Justice registry reveals no case filed by Iran to prove this claim. This is hardly unusual, although it wouldn't perhaps surprise you to see a brazen Iranian Government flouting international law one week and using the ICJ the next to make its case. But we're talking mania and internal struggles here, not calculation. The belligerent faction within the Iranian hierarchy is behind the kidnapping. They want a fight because they sense the weakness in their enemies.

The Iranians are well entrenched across the Middle East. They have an extensive network of sleeper agents in Oman, in the Gulf, and along the Suez Canal. They have been planning things and quietly taking action for a long time. The kidnapping of the Israeli soldier and the subsequent Hezbollah-Israel war of last year was a proxy fight designed to reveal Israel's capabilities and allow for some propaganda battles in the West. That British women were seen marching in London carrying placards saying " We're all Hezbollah now" is potent evidence of Iranian success.

This time, though, Iran has picked an especially weak target. Britain has rarely been in worse hands. Blair is finished, little more than a corpse swinging from a bough as his days in Ten Downing Street ebb away. Gordon Brown is an appalling successor - an inward, envious man with the charisma of a mollusc who is deeply unpopular with the electorate. Waiting in the wings of the Labor Party is a potential challenger, one David Miliband, a climate change obsessive whose contribution to modern British life is a plan for personal carbon accounts for every citizen ( and a corps of inspectors to enforce carbon allowances). In Tehran these two men must surely evoke laughter.

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