Thanks for nothing
Posted by Richard (H/T: Michelle)
Left in the humiliating position of having nothing in the locker with which to take on the Iranians after their abduction of our service personnel, our esteemed government has been running, cap in hand, to the United Nations Security Council for a resolution condemning Iran's action.
For all we got for our efforts, though, we need not have bothered. The mighty mouse groaned and heaved and delivered what Reuters called "a watered-down statement" which merely expressed "grave concern" at the detention of the 15 British crew members, calling on Tehran to allow "consular access" to them. ...
More and more, this is developing into a "Tipperary situation" - after the old joke in which a tourist in the depths of Ireland asks a local the way to the town, only to be told, "I wouldn't start from here".
And, as more details emerge of the snatch, it has emerged that only two boats were initially used by the Iranians. Video footage has been released by Iranian television showing close-ups of one of the vessels, a small speedboat with a crew of three, armed with what appears to be a single 12.7mm machine gun.
This was hardly a formidable force and one which, with the right assets in place and an alert overwatch, could easily have been seen off. Given the enormous repercussions of the kidnapping – to say nothing of the national humiliation – questions as to how the British service personnel were so easily ambushed now become increasingly urgent.
How to Hit Back
James Taranto
It's a bit reminiscent of the Jimmy Carter crisis of 1979-81: Iran last week captured 15 British sailors in Iraqi waters and has been holding them hostage, coercing some into reading videotaped "apologies." In the Washington Times James Lyons, a retired admiral, suggests a show of strength that Carter rejected back then:
In November 1979, when our embassy was sacked and our diplomats were taken hostage, I recommended to the then-acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Tom Hayward, that our only good option really was to capture Kharg Island, Iran's principal oil export depot. If we did this, we could negotiate from a position of strength for the immediate return of our embassy and our diplomats.
Unfortunately, the Carter administration rejected any offensive operations as a means of responding to this blatant act of war against the United States. We were humiliated and seemed to the world to lack the courage to defend our honor. . . .
While our State Department and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office work to obtain U.N. and allied condemnation of Iran's illegal act, the Joint Chiefs of Staff need to develop or refine a series of military options that can be immediately carried out when directed by the commander in chief, President Bush after coordination with Prime Minister Tony Blair.
One such option should be the capture of Kharg Island. That could be viewed as part of a larger economic sanction that the U.N. Security Council has already endorsed. It is not an attack against the Iranian people. In fact, it could further encourage the popular antigovernment movement against the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's corrupt and already shaky regime. The economic cost to Iran would be catastrophic at minimum.
A reader, however, offers this crazy thought:
Capturing Iran's principal oil export depot would play right into the delusions of people who imagine we are out to grab the region's oil. Instead we should act on our concern, the centrifuges at Natanz. A few good hits on top of the centrifuge bunker would at the minimum send a message, and might rattle the notoriously sensitive centrifuges enough to make them unsafe to operate.
In the past, disturbances as small as fingerprints have caused the machines to spin improperly and explode. Now, with more centrifuges operating, one could get a chain reaction, and not the type the ayatollahs had in mind.
In an April 2006 Iranian TV interview (PDF, quote on pp. 4-5), Islamic Republic nuke official Gholamreza Aqazadeh elaborates on the centrifuges' vulnerability:
In the preliminary stages of the work, we noticed that our machines broke down frequently. We couldn't discover the cause, since we didn't have any scientific sources or books to refer to. After great efforts we discovered that our experts didn't wear fabric gloves during the assembly phase. We found out that when you assemble the parts with bare hands, germs are transferred to the machinery from the smallest amount of sweat which comes off the hands.
This little amount of germs is enough to trouble and destroy the machine. When we say a machine is destroyed we mean that it turns into powder.
Either way, as Lyons observes, "such a move would end almost 30 years of our Iranian appeasement policy, demonstrating to Tehran we finally mean business." ...
