The Discerning Texan

All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
Saturday, March 31, 2007

Brits to Cave to Iran? UPDATED

I get it; if I am a rogue state and I want Country A to promise they will not ever violate my "territory", all I need to do is go into Country B's territory and kidnap about 15 of Country A's sailors. Maybe make one of the girls wear a hijab for the camera...

Does that about sum it up?

(I'm sure the Iranians will think twice before ever trying something like this again...)

Please tell me this is a joke.

UPDATE - Victor Davis Hanson:
It’s completely outrageous for any nation to go out and arrest the servicemen of another nation in waters that don’t belong to them.” So spoke Admiral Sir Alan West, former First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy, concerning the present Anglo-Iranian crisis over captured British soldiers. But if the attack was “outrageous,” it was apparently not quite outrageous enough for anything to have been done about it yet.

Sir Alan elaborated on British rules of engagement by stressing they are “very much de-escalatory, because we don’t want wars starting ... Rather than roaring into action and sinking everything in sight we try to step back and that, of course, is why our chaps were, in effect, able to be captured and taken away.”

One might suggest, not necessarily “sinking everything in sight,” but at least shooting back at a few of the people trying to kidnap Britain’s uniformed soldiers. But the view, apparently, is that stepping back and allowing some chaps to be “captured and taken away” is to be preferred to “roaring into action and sinking everything in sight.” The latter is more or less what Nelson did at the battle of the Nile, when he nearly destroyed the Napoleonic fleet.
One would think...

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DiscerningTexan, 3/31/2007 08:24:00 PM |