Offside Farcical Worms

"The flagrant and outrageous Iranian seizure of 15 Royal Navy personnel on patrol in the Shat al-Arab, well outside Iranian waters (we needn’t waste time discussing absurd Iranian claims) is not necessarily connected with anything. The Iranians often pull stunts like that, without fully thinking through their purposes. Rather it should be taken as the latest indication of how unpredictable they are. This is, after all, a country whose president utters public fantasies about nuclear war, in the context of Shia Islamic apocalyptic hallucinations.

But even in this comparatively small matter, in which the Iranians have behaved, yet again, in defiance of all norms of international conduct, just what do the British propose to do about it? Prime Minister Blair said yesterday that efforts to obtain the sailors’ release will enter a “different phase” if diplomatic negotiations fail. In other words, the British will start yelling louder.

What else is possible? It may make no sense for any politician in the West to sink himself, doing what really needs to be done now, to prevent Armageddon farther down the road. It may make more sense to let the catastrophe happen. Whenupon, pretty much everyone will be onside for doing something fairly definitive about Iran." [ Unfortunately, I'm beginning to believe that everyone won't be "onside" when this happens (notice the missing "if"). How I wish I could be more optimistic. We have come to believe that we're history buffs if we can remember the last five minutes and have forgotten that even in WWII there were only 9 Allies. We now ignorantly refer to it as the grand coalition rather than the close run thing it was. The second time a farce and all that... -ed. ]