Shock & Awe

You'll have to click the pic to go to C&F and get the fulll effect on this one. Do it.

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Does This Sound Familiar? 
Ed Morrissey

Tony Blair had better dust off his study material about the Jimmy Carter presidency. It looks like the Iranians have begun another embassy standoff:

About 200 students threw rocks and firecrackers at the British Embassy on Sunday, calling for the expulsion of the country's ambassador because of the standoff over Iran's capture of 15 British sailors and marines.

The British say that the police presence has kept the compound secure, but that supposedly was the case in November 1979, too. As then, Iranian clerics fuel the violent protest and have attracted Iranian youths to demonstrate. This fellow here with the rock is an Iranian imam.

Given the rhetoric from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it doesn't appear as if the mullahcracy wants to de-escalate the crisis on the ground. It will not take long before the police allow themselves to be overwhelmed by the anger of the mob -- and then the Iranians will find themselves in possession of yet another Western embassy. ...

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Khomeinist zombies feeling froggy
outside British embassy in Tehran 
Allahpundit

Only in the Middle East could there be popular anger at the victims of their own kidnappings. “Eight small blasts” were spotted according to the Times of London, which attributes them to “firecrackers.” Microvideo at the Beeb, photos at Yahoo. This one’s my favorite because it’s such a nice microcosm of the duality, and absurdity, of the terror state: both sides there are creations of, and answer to, the regime. It’s the good cop/bad cop dynamic synthesized in one frame.

The embassy protest is getting the headlines but there are other maneuvers afoot today to escalate it. News is breaking as I write this that state TV’s set to air more sailors’ confessions. They’ve also sent a letter to Britain formally protesting the incident outside their offices in Basra last week. As you may recall, British troops were ambushed on the same street as the Iranian consulate, perhaps not coincidentally; they returned fire, which Iran maintains wasn’t in response to an ambush at all but was designed to intimidate the diplomatic staff. Now, today, Iranian TV is claiming another violation of its territory — this time by the U.S., when two of our jets supposedly entered Iranian airspace briefly while flying over Iraq. The military denies it. I can’t believe they’d use that as a pretext to seize any of our guys, but it does help ratchet up nationalist sentiment and feed the fantasy that they’re the aggrieved party in all this. Which may be useful right now: the IDF’s head of intel told the Israeli cabinet a few hours ago that Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah are preparing — defensively, he stressed — for an expected U.S. attack, so this could be part of those preparations. Either that or they’re planning to launch an attack of their own somewhere and want to be sure the public reads it as retaliation instead of aggression, particularly given the consequences that will follow. ...

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If the Iranians hate us, let them also fear us
(U K Telegraph. H/T: Jules C.)

It is one thing to be disliked; quite another to be despised. Iran would not have kidnapped our Servicemen without having considered our rules of engagement, our diplomatic isolation and our likely military response, and made a rough calculation of how likely they were to get away with their piracy.

There was a time when British citizenship afforded a degree of protection from foreign harassment. When the half-mad King of Abyssinia interned two of our diplomats in 1868, we sent an expeditionary force of 13,000 British and Indian troops on a nine-month rescue mission. When Gordon was besieged at Khartoum in 1884, public opinion demanded a relief expedition, whose failure to arrive in time contributed in no small part to the downfall of the government.

During the Don Pacifico Affair in 1850, when Britain blockaded Piraeus in order to secure compensation for a Portuguese moneylender who had been born in Gibraltar, Palmerston assured his countrymen that "a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him from injustice and wrong".

Not any more. Teheran is well aware that we have been taking on additional military responsibilities while running down our capacity. Struggling to meet our commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are in little position to pick a new fight. Public opinion, too, has changed. Where our great-great-grandfathers clamoured for the rescue of Gordon, we have reacted to Iran's provocation with a resigned shrug. Americans, in particular, cannot understand why we seem so indifferent to the fate of our own people. ...

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A Little War Goes A Long Way
Jules Crittenden

I hope by the time you read this, it is out of date. Frankly, I’m amazed as I write this it hasn’t happened already. I am dumbfounded that the Iranians have persisted, with no practical goal beyond harassments and humiliation, and I am exasperated that our usually strong leadership has allowed them to do so.

I hope that by the time you read this, the cruise missiles have already impacted; the stealth bombers have taken out radar and missiles sites; the land and sea blockade is in place … nothing moving in or out of an Iranian port and any road traffic that doesn’t risk death from above. I hope, by the time you read this, the destruction of Iran’s military infrastructure is underway.

Because we are magnanimous, and more importantly are concerned about the long-term price of oil, operations to reduce Iran’s oil production facilities can await a later phase. It’s not clear to me what the holdup has been. I know there are certain niceties civilized nations like to observe. Iran has made little pretense of observing them for a long time. Niceties we’ve observed to the point of allowing them to bind us.

Iran seized British sailors who were lawfully providing security in Iraqi waters. Iran has held and attempted to humiliate those sailors, in defiance of international law and the United Nations Security Council. The European Union, one of the few parties that might be expected to apply any economic leverage on Iran, in typical spineless fashion has declined to do so.

Iran of course has a long history of ignoring the former and being coddled by the latter, so none of that is much of a surprise. Perhaps, like a spoiled child whose tantrums and demands set the family’s agenda, Iran at long last needs to be shown some boundaries.

But this is not really about whether 15 British sailors and marines are freed, or placed on trial or live or die. There are a lot of military men and women being killed these days. Many of them by Iran. ...

See also: Warmongerly Yours

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Power struggle in Iran over hostages

THE fate of the 15 British marines and sailors held in Tehran may depend on the outcome of a power struggle between two of Iran’s top generals, write Uzi Mahnaimi and Marie Colvin.

According to an Iranian military source, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards has called for them to be freed.

Major-General Yahya Rahim Safavi is said to have told the country’s Supreme National Security Council on Friday that the situation was “getting out of control” and urged its members to consider the immediate release of the prisoners to defuse tension in the Gulf.

However, Safavi’s intervention was reportedly denounced by another senior general at a meeting of high-ranking commanders yesterday.

Yadollah Javani, the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ political bureau, was said to have accused him of weakness and “liberal tendencies”. Javani is said to have demanded that the prisoners be put on trial. ...

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Outrageous, demented or both?
Scott Johnson

Mark Steyn's column on the Iranian seizure of 15 British hostages is unusually downbeat. Among other things, Mark decries the rules of engagement under which the forces were apparently operating:

Patrolling the Shatt al-Arab at a time of war, the Royal Navy operates under rules of engagement designed by distant fainthearts with an eye to the polite fictions of "international law": If you're in a "warship," you can't wage war. If you're in a "destroyer," don't destroy anything. If you're in a "frigate," you're frigging done for.

On a related note, William Shawcross writes to ask if we have seen "these extraordinary statements from Zbigniew Brzezinski on Iraq, Iran and Vietnam. He asks: "Outrageous, or demented?" I would guess that Mr. Shawcross is referring in particular to this passage from the article: ...

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EU To Blair: It's A YP, Not An OP
Ed Morrissey

The European Union declined last night to provide any substantial support to Britain in its standoff with Iran over the captured sailors and Marines. While the European foreign ministers called for Iran to release its captives, they refused to offer any sanctions on the Iranians:

European foreign ministers failed last night to back Britain in a threat to freeze the €14 billion trade in exports to Iran, as the hostage crisis descended into a propaganda circus.

Tony Blair could only issue a new statement of disgust as Iran tormented him with another sailor’s video confession and a fresh letter from the young mother detainee. ...

Well, what a shock to see the French bail out on an ally for commercial gain! Once again, Europe shows that it has no sense and no courage. That fourteen-billion-pound trade with Iran will come in handy when the mullahs get the bomb. Perhaps they'll wait to invade Europe last. They have told Blair and the Brits that the Iranians are their problem, not Europe's.

George Bush stood up with the UK yesterday, after keeping a low profile on the crisis. Referring to the captives as "hostages", Bush emphatically supported Britain's assertion that Iran invaded Iraqi waters to carry out the capture:

[...]

The Telegraph has concluded that Europe is useless as a foreign-policy partner as well:

[...]

All of a sudden, those "large coalition garrisons" look pretty strategic, don't they? I'm always amazed by the people who claim that we screwed up the war on terror by going after Iraq rather than Iran. If people could learn to read a map, they could see what we have attempted -- a military and political encirclement of Iran that no one could have dreamed six years ago. Why do people think Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pulled this stunt? He wants to drive the UK out of the coalition in order to break that encirclement.  ...

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British Hostages Seek Asylum in Iran
by Scott Ott

(2007-04-01) — In a fresh, un-coerced video communiqué released today by the Iranian government, 15 British sailors and marines held captive for eight days, said they would seek asylum in Iran, “the only country that really seems to want us.” ...

“Whatever else you might think about President Ahmadinejad,” said one British sailor under no duress, “at least he took risks to get us, and genuinely desires to keep us in his country; which is more than we can say for Prime Minister [Tony] Blair.” ...