[Marxism] "British gunboats in an area out of Iraqi control"

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

www.counterpunch.org

April 2, 2007

"British Gunboats in an Area Out of Iraqi Control"
A Bogus Hostage Crisis
By GARY LEUPP

On March 31 the President of the United States made a statement pertaining
to the 15 British sailors and marines unfortunately detailed in Iran: "The
Iranians must give back the hostages. They're innocent. The Iranians took
these people out of Iraqi waters. It's inexcusable behavior."

But since the American people don't trust George W. Bush, let's seek a
second opinion. A credible authoritative one.

Let's ask the top Iraqi military officer in charge of guarding the Shatt
al-Iraq waterway where the Brits were actually apprehended. This man is
working for the U.S.-backed regime and probably not inclined to make up
stuff to embarrass the U.S. president, who gives him his paycheck. So his
opinion should be relevant here. Let's ask Brigadier General Hakim Jassim.

The good general told Associated Press the day after the March 23 incident:
"We were informed [about the British troops' arrests] by Iraqi fishermen,
after they had returned from sea that there were British gunboats in an area
that is out of Iraqi control. We don't know why they were there.'"

Gen. Jassim---again, working for the Anglo-American occupiers of his
nation---does not sound outraged by the Iranian action. And notice how the
Iraqi client-state apparatus, which for some time has been telling
Washington, "Don't drag us into your anti-Iranian projects" is not calling
the detained Britons "hostages." It has indeed (with much of the world)
protested the illegal U.S. detention of Iranian diplomats in Irbil, in Iraqi
Kurdistan.

(That particular instance of "inexcusable behavior" hasn't gotten much press
in this country. Nor has the subdued Iranian response to the provocation.)

Gen. Jassim would agree that the Shatt al-Arab river where the Brits were
seized has no clearly marked boundary and has been the focus of past
quarrels between Iraq and Iran. (Commodore Peter Lockwood of the Royal
Australian Navy, commanding the Coalition task force in the waterway last
October, said as much: "No maritime border has been agreed upon by the
countries.") Craig Murray, once head of the British Foreign Office's
maritime section, writes that Prime Minister Blair "is being fatuous" in
stating that he is "utterly certain" the British ship was seized within
Iraqi territorial limits. Murray, best known as the former British
Ambassador to Uzbekistan (who exposed British complicity in torture in that
country) writes as follows:

"There is no agreed boundary in the Northern Gulf, either between Iran and
Iraq or between Iraq and Kuwait. The Iran-Iraq border has been agreed inside
the Shatt al-Arab waterway, because there it is also the land border. But
that agreement does not extend beyond the low tide line of the coast. 
"Even that very limited agreement is arguably no longer in force. Since it
was reached in 1975, a war has been fought over it, and ten-year reviews---
necessary because waters and sandbanks in this region move about
dramatically---have never been carried out."

Gen. Jassim might privately agree that this border issue in any case is the
business of Iraqis and Iranians---rather than British and American
imperialists popping up in the region at no one's invitation, on false
pretexts, slaughtering people and expecting as they do so that the conquered
locals will say "Thanks, boss!"

Bush is trying to depict the March 23 incident as a "hostage crisis,"
stoking memories of the 1979-81 Iran Embassy episode. (Younger readers may
need some reminding. After the overthrow of the U.S.-backed and universally
despised Shah of Iran, in the most genuine mass-based revolutionary upheaval
in the history of the modern Islamic world, the Carter administration
allowed the Shah refuge in the U.S. and refused to extradite him to Iran to
stand trial. This prompted Iranian students to seize the U.S. embassy and
detain its personnel. Those seized were released as Ronald Reagan was
inaugurated as Carter's successor in January 1981. The incident unleashed
much bigotry, hatred and war fever in this country, to the delight of those
wishing to shock the U.S. public out of the "Vietnam Syndrome.")

Just as the seizure of the Americans in 1979 needs to be understood in
perspective, the detention of these Britons has to be understood in the
context of the crime of the Iraq War itself. Whatever the actual coordinates
of the vessel boarded and seized by the Iranians, why are the British
policing the Shatt al-Arab waterway at all?
[snip]



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