Both the Palestinian and the Iranian electorate are very young, unsophisticated and prone to being stoked up by rabble rousers. ie: they are not very smart.
Ahmadinejad and Hamas are long on rhetoric, make unacceptable demands, and do not understand that provocation and rabble rousing is not very smart.
Actually Mahmoud Abbas and some hard to identify Iranian leaders seem pretty sensible, but unfortunately they are not in the ascendancy.
In both cases the electorate selected leaders who are not going to act in their best interests - this is not smart behaviour.
Currently the state of play is that the Iranians are saying that the sailors confessed to being in Iranian waters. Well that is so interesting …
My guess is that there is some sort of powerplay going on, which would explain the defection of the generals and why Ahmadinejad decided to stay at home.
Iran moves a pawn, western media stirs from it’s only mildly hysterical slumber, the Anglo-Saxon warrior culture jerks - knee, neck and phallas - and Iran will likely play it by ear with an initial view of getting everyone home by teatime on Friday.
Saddam thought that he could get away with grandstanding, he played stupid games with the WMD inspectors and suddenly things got out of control.
The trick is to use the Western media, to understand the psychology of the people who vote for Bush and Blair. For example, simply stating the longitude and latitude of the point where the UK sailors were picked up would have got people thinking - and an illustrator drawing a map showing the borders with a big red X marks the spot.
Saying the sailors ‘confessed’ is just going to get people thinking ‘well they would have confessed to being on the Moon’.
The Iranians could have scored real Brownie points by inviting a couple of competing television crews in to see the sailors, and say that they’ll be released as soon as they have completed a remedial course in navigation.
As it is, it sounds as if they are setting up a mock trial.
The joke is that the Iranians could simply lie about the co-ordinates, and they would get even more humour if they said that this has been going on for months, we think that their GPS equipment is faulty, so we decided to inspect it.
Putting aside the he said/she said nonsense, I can see three potential outcomes to this, none of which include (or justify) all-out war…
Most likely - Iran takes a few pictures, scores some brownie points with their public, and release the sailors unharmed within a week or two. This would result in some grumbling from Britain but no action other than launches keeping closer to the mothership, and any future kidnap attempts met with force.
Less likely - Iran refuses to release the hostages indefinitely, or convicts and sends them to jail. I suspect this would result in further sanctions and possibly the freezing of some Iranian assets. Possible surgical rescue attempt if concrete intelligence of their location is found, but no especially risky actions likely to result in further hostages.
Not likely - Iran executes the sailors. Sanctions, cut of diplomatic contact, and potential cruise missile strikes against Iranian military targets deemed a threat (like naval bases).
There is no independent evidence one way or the other. And taking the word of the UK Govt is a bird that has long since flown.
Maybe they had strayed and were finally captured in international waters? Who knows?
My guess would be it is a retaliatory act for the kidnapping of their generals and the seizure of their so-called diplomats who were in the country with the permission of the Iraq govt.
Like I said - when you get down in the gutter you can’t complain when the other side joins you. It’s a shame innocent British servicemen have to suffer for the acts of others but I’ll bet they are being better treated than the missing generals and others are by the US during their ‘interrogations’.
Unfortunately the hamster had a coronory while posting an ea
rlier (um) post where I was saying that Iranian Generals were quite well dispositioned towards the USA (well count the years and guess who trained them).
If you believe, for one second, they and the others are not being waterboarded half to death to provide ‘evidence’ of Iranian nuclear bomb ambitions or involvement in Iraq then I have a bridge for you.
And as there is no evidence whatsoever the missing generals defected I’m guessing they aren’t feeling that co-operative.
The actual briefing room is a secure facility at an undisclosed location in Westminster.
It basically allows all the right people (in this case probably Cabinet Ministers, Military Staff, Intelligence chiefs and Diplomats) to conference (in person, or via encrypted video or audio links) and come up with plans to deal with various national crises.
You’re high on speculation and completely lacking in evidence, which makes your commentary here a bit ironic.
Obviously the President of France disagrees with this assessment, which is actually an assessment which is of importance in the geopolitical landscape. There’s nothing like a bold move from Iran like this which violates hundreds of years of diplomatic conventions to move the Western world closer together and create an “us versus them” atmosphere.
I thought that bad-movie-cliche syndrome was a distinctly American politicopsychopathology . . .