We’ve Lost The Authority to Lecture Iran
The Iraqi Misadventure has Rendered Britain Too Demoralised to Respond With Serious Force
This is an area of patriotic pride into which the Ayatollah Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad probably seldom stray when they meet for a cup of tea and a pot of finest Iranian beluga, but the birthplace of human rights was Iran. In 539BC, on being crowned king of Babylon, Cyrus the Great read out a declaration now held in the British Museum, and known as the First Charter of Human Rights.
“I announce that I will respect the traditions, customs and religions of the nations of my empire,” recited the Persian monarch. “While I am the King of Iran, Babylon and the nations of the four directions, I will never let anyone oppress any others, and if it occurs I will… penalise the oppressor. I will never let anyone take possession of movable and landed properties of the others by force…”
Nothing specific there about such movables as Royal Navy vessels and their personnel (great warrior, that Cyrus, but no foresight), but you get the gist. That a country invented something important is no guarantee that it will remain a world leader in the field in perpetuity, as close followers of the England football team may have worked out for themselves. But Iran’s regression in human rights terms since Cyrus blazed such a spectacular trail two and a half millennia ago (his insistence that “everyone is free to choose a religion” has a particularly poignant ring; so, alas, does his ambition to “exterminate slavery all over the world”) puts the travails of Steve McClaren in the shade.
Having said that, the reaction to the televising of Faye Turney on Wednesday does seem slightly hysterical. It goes without saying that the seizure of the 15 sailors and marines, whether or not they had strayed into Iranian waters (and it seems certain that they didn’t), is inexcusable on every level. So is the transparent coercion of a frightened young woman to say things she clearly didn’t wish to say.
And yet although Leading Seaman Turney seemed stressed, naturally enough, she also looked healthy. There were no overt signs of any physical violence, and her hands were not cuffed. She was wearing civilian clothes, and was allowed to smoke. So on hearing Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, saying that it is “totally unacceptable to parade our people in this way”, the image that flashes to mind is that of other people being paraded for a global television audience, their legs and hands chained together, their bodies immersed in lurid orange boiler suits.
The British Government wasn’t directly responsible for Guantanamo Bay, but it colluded in the illegal seizure of suspects taken there and mistreated to an unimaginably worse degree than appears the case with LS Turney. It assisted the Americans in their pioneering extension of the concept of outsourcing to take in torture, allowing CIA jets to refuel at British airports while transporting suspects to countries with a similarly unCyrus-like approach to human rights as modern Iran.
And it never raised a squeak about such criminal acts as the kidnap of Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr, an EU citizen who was walking down a Milanese street in February 2003 when CIA operatives snatched him, bundled him into the back of a white van, and flew him to Cairo for interrogation.
None of this is to suggest, of course, that one nation’s collusion in the illegal seizure of foreign nationals in any way justifies the use of the same indefensible tactics by another, or diminishes the seriousness of the offence. But British complicity in these American crimes raises questions about the source of the moral authority fuelling the current outrage about LS Turney’s television appearance. If it did contravene the Geneva Convention, inmates of Camp X-Ray were expressly excluded from its protection, although they were supposedly captured in war (the abstract one against terrurrh), and no Cabinet minister publicly objected to that. It also highlights yet again the extent to which the catastrophic blunder in Iraq is undermining attempts to deal effectively with Iran.
Precisely why the Iranians captured the officers remains opaque, even now, a week after the event, largely because of the confused command structure at the top of their government and the factional nature of the military. What is crystal clear, however, is that Iran would never have dared so blatant an act of brinkmanship were it not convinced, quite correctly, that the Iraqi misadventure has rendered Britain too nervous and demoralised, not to mention militarily overstretched, to respond with serious force.
If the Iranians aren’t remotely spooked by the presence in the region of US aircraft carriers designed to focus their minds on Mr Bush’s warnings about the consequences of continuing with their nuclear programme, it’s hard to imagine Margaret Beckett petrifying them into line. Not even if she uses that specially fierce tone of rebuke she usually reserves for boy racers tailgating the caravan on rural lanes.
Four years after joining a war notionally intended to defuse the threat of non-existent weapons of mass distraction, we see more clearly than ever how that war has emboldened Iraq’s neighbour to develop real ones; and how impotent that war has left Britain and the US so far as containing a volatile, oil-rich country gripped by paranoia about the intentions of the local nuclear superpower, Israel, and presided over by the world stage’s closest thing, in Mr Ahmadinejad, to a fully fledged village idiot.
Upsetting as the vision of a distressed young mother certainly is, in the nuclear scheme of things the manipulation of LS Turney for propaganda purposes looks a fairly small step on the long, winding and disturbingly signpost-free road towards regional nuclear proliferation. The anguish expressed here by politicians and pundits stems less, one suspects, from any genuine fear for the officers’ safety - the Iranians may have become audacious, but they are not suicidally stupid and will release them unharmed, if traumatised, as in the similar incident of three years ago - than wounded pride that the naval officers of a once-dominant maritime power should be treated with such undisguised disdain.
Somewhere in all this lies a moral. Gunboat diplomacy is a thing of the past, even if we could find a spare gunboat, and for all the public pretence of “ratcheting up the heat” on the Iranians, they need to be handled with the softest of kid gloves, and cajoled into behaving by a coalition of international trading partners sympathetic to the plight of the sailors. For the days when Britain had the stature, self-confidence and façade of moral authority to play sergeant to the US chief inspector on the global stage are over, and the villains know it.
This is the legacy of Iraq, and if the posturing of the Iranians leaves Mr Blair’s successors in less doubt than ever about that, the ordeal of Leading Seaman Turney and her 14 colleagues will not have been in vain.
© 2007 The Independent
“it goes without saying that the seizure of the 15 sailors and marines…is inexcusable on every level…”
Isn’t the US currently holding several Iranian diplomatic personnel who were seized at gunpoint from their consulate in Iraq? Isn’t this even more inexcusable? Why isn’t the media covering this?
>For the days when Britain had the stature, self-confidence and >façade of moral authority to play sergeant to the US chief >inspector on the global stage are over, and the villains know it.
When exactly did britain have the moral authority in the world stage ? I really have to go back to my history books to look this up or maybe I need to alter my moral paradigm to somehow accomodate this assumption.
Where I come from the term ‘british’ and ‘morals’ are as distant as ‘al-qaeda’ and ‘world peace’ !!
Agreed gyptian.
A sense of jingoism, or wahever the British term is for national imperial arrogance, runs through this whole piece…
Right on gyptian. “We” never had the moral authority to lecture Iran. And as for the identity of the “world stage’s closest thing to a village idiot,” I would award that honor to George W. Bush.
I will agree with the author that it is uterly stomach turning to listen to British objections over the “parading” of these sailors when one thinks of the outrages committed against our “enemies” at Guantanamo, to say nothing of the horrors at Abu Ghraib. While these may be American projects, the British have also been part of the occupation of Iraqi, Iran’s neighbor. How would we feel if Canada or Mexico were occupied by a hostile power bent on dominating us?
“I cant understand all this squeamishness about using gas! … I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.”
- Winston Churchill, the “uncivilised tribes” refer to uncooperative Iraqis
!!!!!!!!!!!! EMERGENCY CALL TO ACTION !!!!!!!!!!!
I don’t think Bush has any intention of vetoing the Supplemental funding bill if it ever gets to his desk. One of the benchmarks he has to certify turns Iraq’s oil over to the major American and British oil companies is buried in this Supplemental!
Please read Richard Beham’s “George Bush’s Land Mine” just posted here on Common Dreams. Excerpt:
“The Iraqi Parliament has before it today, in fact, a bill called the hydrocarbon law, and it does call for revenue sharing among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. For President Bush, this is a must-have law, and it is the only “benchmark” that truly matters to his Administration.
Yes, revenue sharing is there-essentially in fine print, essentially trivial. The bill is long and complex, it has been years in the making, and its primary purpose is transformational in scope: a radical and wholesale reconstruction-virtual privatization-of the currently nationalized Iraqi oil industry.
If passed, the law will make available to Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, BP/Amoco, and Royal Dutch/Shell about 4/5’s of the stupendous petroleum reserves in Iraq. That is the wretched goal of the Bush Administration, and in his speech setting the revenue-sharing “benchmark” Mr. Bush consciously avoided any hint of it.
The legislation pending now in Washington requires the President to certify to Congress by next October that the benchmarks have been met-specifically that the Iraqi hydrocarbon law has been passed. That’s the land mine: he will certify the American and British oil companies have access to Iraqi oil. This is not likely what Congress intended, but it is precisely what Mr. Bush has sought for the better part of six years.
It is why we went to war.”
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ACT NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We have to contact every member in the Congress that is on the panel to reconcile the House and Senate version of the Supplemental funding bill that just passed both houses of Congress. This “benchmark” has to be stripped out of this bill before it goes to Shrub’s desk!
GO! GO! GO!!!
P.S. I’m going to go on over to Move On and see what the can do.
Thanks.
“It goes without saying that the seizure of the 15 sailors and marines, whether or not they had strayed into Iranian waters (and it seems certain that they didn’t), is inexcusable on every level.”
This is back where PJD started, and sometimes I just can’t let a ridiculous statement like this one pass.
The author is saying that seizing foreign soldiers who have entered into your sovereign territory (”whether or not they strayed”, and I personally am not so convinced that they didn’t “stray” btw) is inexcusable on every level?
So presumably our British author would be perfectly happy to have some iranian marines “straying” into British territorial waters? Give you head a shake!
First post, but a regular reader (who finally got signed up properly), enjoying everyones posts.
2c
There is nothing to gain by demonizing Mr Ahmadinejad, or the late Saddam Hussein, or whoever. It does not change their behavior. The WMDs that Saddam had back in the 1980s and early 1990s were provided by the U.S. for use in their war with Iraq. And Saddam met the same fate as any U.S. ally who has become an embarrassment and outlived his usefulness to U.S. interests…consider Manuel Noreiga for example. As for the British sailors, I sympathize with their current plight but it was the actions of Blair that got them there. I don’t believe _either_ Iraq’s claim or Britain’s claim as to where the sailors actually were. But, if Britain can see fit to take responsibility, I suspect the sailors would be released very soon, unharmed–a win-win situation. If Britain continues to bully Iraq, the sailors will be held for some time. In any event the sailors will be released unharmed. It’s well past time for the U.S. and Britain to take full responsibility for the damage we’ve done to Iraq and soon to Iran (possibly). NO! I don’t trust the U.S. government anymore on anything from Katrina/Walter Reed/wiretapping, to the Iraq war/torturing of detainees.
Bush will not leave office in 2009!
Our only hope, and I’ve thought this since the collapse of the Soviet Union, is that we need to revitalized and extremely dangerous Russia, or China to counterbalance the U.S. The great power of the U.S. military, combined with the great stupidity of U.S. leadership, is frightening. I don’t completely trust Putin, but I like him. Unlike Bush, he knows when to and how to intelligently use power, and will assert Russian power at the right time.
Note also, Bush’s signing of the U.S. National Space Policy (not a treaty) in Oct. 2006, which reads to me as a declaration that the U.S. and only the U.S. can and will militarize space. Very dangerous policy!
Note also, the Bush decision to replace Trident missiles with more modern missiles–yet another escalation of the arms race. Very dangerous abd wasteful policy.
The U.S. will _never_ withdraw from Afghanistan or Iraq. We’ve built very large military bases in both countries and are there to stay.
indictments and removal of the american war criminials from our midst…..Nothing left but this……
I do not know Mr. Mathew Norman, the writer of this article, but I know the Independent to be a credible news organization, which goes to show that sometimes I could be wrong. The article is totally biased and one-sided, and at times insulting. Calling the Iranian president a village villain is not as news worthy in comparison to British Prime Minister Blair who is now the infamous No 2 war criminal in the WORLD.
The writer claims that it seems certain that the sailors did not astray into the Iranian waters. This is, of course, by no means certain and has to be determined by an independent international body. It further claims that Iraq war has emboldened Iran to make nuclear weapons. This is also absurd as evidenced by the IAEA reports which todate have found no such evidence.
The writer further talks about the plight of the captured sailors and how LS Tuney seemed stressed. Based on what can be seen on the video, Tuney seemed at times to be smiling. How stressful could that be? Obviously, Mr. Norman does not know the meaning of ‘plight’ either. For a definition of that word I would have to refer him to either those Gitmo inmates who have committed suicide, or to those extradited by His Lordship Tony Blair for torture.
Also the Geneva Conventions that prohibit showing prisoners of war in public is not applicable here since Britain and Iran are not at war. There is probably only one reason the British Government, and particularly Blair, are so angry. Blair probably wanted to cry and whine and raise more propaganda dust about the plight of the sailors. The videos denied him.
The Bush administration just announced that it would not envisage any sort of exchange of the five Iranians in US detention in Iraq for the 15 British sailors held in Iran.
What the Bush administration should do and certainly owes to its British coalition partner, not to mention the American public, is make a detailed public statement explaining why the detention of the five Iranians, who don’t have consular contacts either, is perfectly legal, and according to what laws and jurisdictions in comparison to the Iranian detention of the British sailors which is not, if indeed they had not stayed into Iranian waters.
I don’t anticipate the Bust administration will do anything of the sort but it’s high time the European Union called for just such an explanation. The EU has upheld the British call for support. Now it’s time for the EU to address the Iranian question in this same framework.
Meanwhile it looks like the Iranians have got a perfect display of the west getting caught in its own trap of hypocrisy.
Apart from questions about the credibility of British claims that the 15 captured Britons were not in Iranian waters - there is a very distinct possibility that one of the things that was on the minds of the Iranians when they captured the 15 Britons was the possibility of an Israel and/or US bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Mark Marshall
Toronto
We keep sending war ships into their back yard and we wonder why they suddenly do something? How dumb? Bush wants WW3, so he is going to get it. We all are along for the ride, but there is no stopping them, a war with Iran is his next move weather you like it or not. It is a done deal people, wake up and smell the coffee.
The screaming from UK authorities about “illegal detention” of their sailors is laughable. They don’t give a hoot about what’s legal & what’s not. They freely allow themselves to invade & occupy sovereign nations when it suits them; they collaborate with, support, & give aid & comfort to criminals & torturers like Bush. They only scream about “legal” when it’s their adversaries doing something they’d happily do themselves, without a second thought.
As far as the sailors are concerned, what the hell are British sailors doing in the Persian Gulf, in the first place? Oh, that’s right, they’re there because the UK helped invade Iran’s neighbor & are now occupying it. My, what an impressive legal position.
Let’s be clear about who the main criminals are, here (and the main global village idiots): Blair and Bush, and all their contemptible flunkies in government & in the Western press (of whom Mr Norman is apparently one).
Where in the world, amongst all the high-priced political leadership of all stripes, nationalities and persuasions, is there a voice of reason and balance to counter these madmen as they drag the world closer and closer to World War?
For want of empathy and understanding we may be about to be led into a devastating conflagration.
A trigger is about to be pulled.
Remember the Powers guy whose spy plane was downed several years ago over Russia? We in the USA claimed that he had accidentally strayed over a tip of Russian territory and it was criminal what the Russians had done. It was only later that we had to admit that Powers was piloting a spy plane over the heart of Russia. Our hypocrisy is amazing.
WhatIf…
From the very beginning of the Bush regimes crusading incursion into this military misadventure, they have managed to exceed the definition for the term hypocrisy, at every, self-serving, step along the way. This is just another one of their fine, shining examples.
When a great light is turned into darkness, the darkness can be very dark indeed. But, I’m afraid, as long as the public remains unmoved by this continued display of arrogant pride and savage force, happy in a false notion perhaps, the momentum forward for this darkness will prevail. I’m not condoning riots in the streets, which are very likely to occur should force be escalated into Iran and other areas of the region. Must we wait for this to happen before public sentiment is sufficiently incensed to end this, Gandi fashion, before it does spiral into the madness of chaos? I think we have kept ourselves too long in the clutches of materialistic Disneyland.
Here is a rallying cry for all of the souls, young and old, tired of the mindless bloody boots on the ground: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-NRriHlLUk
Best wishes and always, hope
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk1vEuhBuEU