[Marxism] Imperialist hawks, seeing blow to Iran war plans, take out frustration on British sailors

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm sending in several articles on the British sailors issue, which
highlight the fact that the result of the confrontation was more, not fewer,
obstacles to attacking Iran.  

As a very cautious fellow, I am not ready to turn the red light on this one
to orange yet, but objectively that seems to be the direction -- though
insane adventurism on the part of US imperialism is becoming less likely.
It seems to me that even the Bush team is losing its confidence that
attacking Iran is a viable way out for them.

The most important question here is from former UN Ambassador John Bolton
excoriated the British Foreign Office: "This passive, hesitant, almost
acquiescent approach barely concealed the Foreign Office's real objective:
keeping the faint hope alive that three years of failed negotiations on
Iran's nuclear-weapons program would not suffer another, this time possibly
fatal, setback." 

I'm  not ready to go as far as Bolton yet.  He may be hitting the panic
button to rally  the troops.  But I have to assume that he is pretty
knowledgeable about the line-up in the US government at present.
Fred Feldman


HEROES OR COWARDS? NEOCONS WEIGH IN ON SAILORS
By Khody Akhavi 

Inter Press Service
April 10, 2007 

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=37289
or
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ID12Ak03.html 

WASHINGTON -- Name, rank, serial number, and your signature on the dotted
line. No sooner had Britain's 15 "kidnapped" sailors and marines returned
from their harrowing "hostage" experience at the hands of Iran than some
were lining up to sell their stories to the British press. 

And no sooner had they been accused of "acting like reality-TV stars" than
they became a punching bag for neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks
in the United States who cast the sailors' "humiliating" behavior and their
government's equally "bungled" response as an affront to the Anglosphere and
its interests in the Middle East. 

"If there has ever in history been a faster, more humiliating submission to
Stockholm syndrome, we're unaware of it," read an editorial in the New York
Post, a neo-conservative daily owned by Australian-born Rupert Murdoch's
News Corporation. "But aren't British service personnel trained for this
sort of thing?" 

Mark Steyn, a neo-conservative syndicated columnist for the Chicago
Sun-Times, was equally unimpressed when he wrote, "The Queen's Navee had
been demobbed. The token gal was dressed up as an Islamic woman, and the 14
men had been kitted out in [Iranian President Mahmud] Ahmadinejad's
leisurewear." 

The details of training for hostage situations are kept secret, according to
Britain's Defense Ministry. If the Iranian government's sophisticated
tactics of coercion are any indication, the training would not have made
much of a difference anyway. 

Iran used the British sailors -- captured last month by members of Iran's
Revolutionary Guards as they patrolled the Shatt-al-Arab waterway -- as a
propaganda tool. They paraded them in front of Iran's state-run media and
coerced confessions from them. 

But the British government may have been just as eager to manipulate Iran's
tawdry stunt to its advantage. Its first step? Cite "exceptional
circumstances" and allow the sailors to sell their version of events to the
British media. 

However, the window of opportunity to cash in was short-lived, as the
Ministry of Defense on Monday banned any more sailors from profiting from
their captivity. That was after the lone female sailor, Leading Seaman Faye
Turney, 26, reportedly struck deals worth more than 100,000 pounds (about
US$200,000) with British channel ITV1 for her story, and after Arthur
Batchelor, 20, the youngest of the sailors, told the *Daily Mirror* that he
"cried like a baby" in his prison cell. 

"A guard kept flicking my neck with his index finger and thumb. I thought
the worst. We've all seen the videos," said Batchelor in the same interview,
perhaps referring to decapitation videos made by clandestine terrorist
organizations such as al-Qaeda, the most notorious of which captured the
murders of American businessman Nicholas Berg and Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl. 

Iran has not been implicated in the creation or distribution of decapitation
videos popularized by Sunni extremist groups in Iraq. 

In response to Britain's vigorous defense that the sailors "acted with
immense courage and dignity," the same *New York Post* editorial remarked,
"That's just icing on the capitulation cake -- adding to a humiliation that
will have consequences far into the future." 

It's the consequences of Britain's ostensible "soft power" approach with
Iran that enrage neo-conservative columnists such as Charles Krauthammer the
most. For him, the "humiliation" suffered by the British is evidence that
the international community and "its great institutions" are a sham, and
that multilateralism is a dead end. 

"You want your people back? Go to the [European Union] and get stiffed. Go
to the [United Nations] Security Council and get a statement that refuses
even to 'deplore' this act of piracy," he wrote in the Washington Post.
"Then turn to the despised Americans. They'll deal you some cards and bail
you out." 

With 136 British servicemen and women killed in Iraq, the British government
announced in February a new timetable for withdrawing much of its
7,000-strong force from the war-torn country. Prime Minister Tony Blair told
the House of Commons that 3,000 of those soldiers will have left southern
Iraq by the end of 2007. 

Britain's announcement came as the administration of U.S. President George
W. Bush sent 21,100 more troops to Iraq, and the standoff between Iran and
Britain over the detained sailors brought a new complication for Blair, who
wants to tiptoe out of Basra before the situation gets out of hand. 

Other neo-conservative hawks have seized on Britain's "bungled" diplomatic
response as an argument for unilateral action and a warning for Iran's
future dealings with the international community with regard to its nuclear
aspirations. 

In an op-ed piece in the Financial Times, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N.
John Bolton excoriated the British Foreign Office: "This passive, hesitant,
almost acquiescent approach barely concealed the Foreign Office's real
objective: keeping the faint hope alive that three years of failed
negotiations on Iran's nuclear-weapons program would not suffer another,
this time possibly fatal, setback." 

Fox News got in on the act too, framing the debate of the returning sailors
in terms of whether they are heroes or cowards. 

"There's no way to put a good face on this, the kissy-face with Ahmadinejad,
the goodie bags, this was a real failure of leadership," said
Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters to Neil Cavuto of Fox. "A U.S. service
member would not accept that goodie bag, wouldn't profusely in front of the
cameras thank the Iranian president." 

Lieutenant-Colonel Bob Maginnis, another Fox "expert" and contributor to a
Christian radio program called "Jimmy DeYoung's Prophecy Today Weekly,"
labeled the British sailors "cowards." 

"It looks like 'Holiday in Tehran' . . . They were standing in front of
Ahmadinejad, and you know they were thanking him for their kind treatment,
for letting them go . . . He was giving them Persian candy and all sorts of
souvenirs to take home." 

But neo-conservative CNN talk-show pundit Glen Beck summed it up most
eloquently when he proclaimed, "Iran played chicken with the West and we
blinked." 




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