Iran Captures and Holds British Sailors

I was reading about that- apparently- they dragged the UK soldiers into Iranian waters.

I wonder if the ship they had boarded held some very important "cargo" destined for Iraq?

I am not sure this will be a spark for war though. You;d have to really want to start a war over such a thing. You know, just looking for any excuse

Didn't North Korea hold some of our troops a few years back when a choper or plane went down? Or was that China?

Either way I remember us handling it using our super duper diplomacy...I don't see why we can't do the same here unless we choose not to.

Iran will return them with little issue. They don't want to risk re-assembly of the coalition against them.

trailmaster-

it was china- they held some of our USAF personnel after they emergency landed .. i think it was in Taiwan, after a collision with a Chinese fighter pilot (who died- I think his name was wang).

Sounds like some overzealous Iranian troops. I imagine that, after an interrogation as to why the troops were where they were and what they intended to do, they'll be released.

Wars often follow small minor events. History is littered with them. Look at what happened in Lebanon last summer, as a recent example.

Is it in Iran's interest to provoke a war against the western industrialized nations lined up against them next door, with the combined air power of the US, UK, Israel and others?

Is Iran really after 10s of thousands of their own civilians killed and much of their infrastructure in smoking ruins?

If the answer is "yes".......

The sheep continue to lap up the Bushinista propaganda. Clearly, this is a Karl Rove event staged to distract from the inadequacies and improprieties of the Bushinistas. Credible sources are reporting Halliburton painters putting the final touches on Iranian Warships in an Iraqi/US boat yard just 3 days ago. Very interesting. As usual, the sheep lack the tools to assemble the puzzle. I will spell it out for those in cognitive drought: New Muslim aggression needed to distract from new Whitehouse scandal. Carry on.

It's all Rove and the Number 42. That's all you need to know.

Lets give this some thought.
1. Royal Navy ship approaches target to drop off troops in rubber boats.
2. Royal Navy ship has radar. Knows who else is near.
3. Royal Navy allows Iranian Navy ship to approach and board target.
4. Royal Navy allows Iranian Navy ship to capture British troops (no gunfire).

This only makes sense if the Royal Navy ship knew that this happened in Iranian waters.

I hope that the above is wrong, but I am waiting for a better explanation.

Let's send Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton over there to negotiate. Yea... that's it...

That's a new one. edit: Bushinistas?


This "sheep" would like a source or link please.


I'm not bashing you. This administration will do anything to sway us sheep, but that whole "painted Iranian ships" needs some back up (and don't link to Prisonplanet).

Here's the first ripple from this incident. Pretty obvious. Guess they were tired of using a



for the other excuses.

Oh boy! Oh Boy! A conspiracy! A conspiracy! Where do we add to? Weeeeeeeeeee!!!!!

Iranian president to visit U.S. Saturday

Start your own thread!

Waitaminnit.... I'm confusing reality with the latest episodes of '24'...

I certainly hope that's true, but I'm not so sure. I have a feeling their seizing of these individuals is in retaliation (tit for tat) for the recent seizing/kidnapping/abduction of high-level Iranians.



http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle1530527.ece

this is Bush's fault in 3.....2......1.....

I agree. It's the minor events - that no-one sees coming - that often escalate a situation since no-one has planned for it and everybody starts improvising.

Although I'm not sure how "unplanned" a situation this would eventually be. Iran has to know that every major power involved has an offensive strategy tucked away, and everybody knows that Iran has long made preparations to defend itself from an invasion.

Iran might not be able to withstand a US attack, but then again, neither could Iraq or Afghanistan, yet we're still bogged down in both countries. \

The thought of yet another military conflict has me not only concerned, but scared. I mean, you can almost hear the sigh in his voice when the Secretary of Defense says something to the effect of, "Yeah, I guess we could do another war despite the fact that our Armed Forces are already stretched so thin in Iraq and Afghanistan". If there is any lesson to be learned from both of these wars, it's that you can't underestimate the number of troops you will need to win the war.

We're at the point in Afghanistan now where there are more police officers in NYC than American troops in Afghanistan. Yet this was the terrorist haven where Al Qaeda was able to orchestrate the 9/11 attacks and where senior Taliban and Al Qaeda officials continue to evade capture and prosecution for their crimes. Our top priority should have been to round these guys up yet there weren't enough troops committed to the effort. We saw the results of this at Tora Bora where the Northern Alliance was sent in to take out the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces instead of coalition forces. If we only had more troops on the ground, I think Bin Laden would have been captured along with Mullah Omar and other high level officials.

The same is true with Iraq, we didn't have enough troops on the ground to get the job done and it allowed the insurgency to survive. The fact that the majority of the weapons that the 'insurgents' have were taken from Iraqi army ammo dumps that we seized in the first days of the war and didn't have enough troops to defend them speaks volumes about the need to have enough boots on the ground when we start.

Now we're talking war with Iran and we already know that there we don't have enough troops to get the job done right in a timely manner. Are we going to have a draft to boost our miliatry's numbers? If not, what would we do if a crisis developed elsewhere in the world? What if Pakistan's government fell apart and Islamic radicals took over? Then we'd have to deal with an Islamic state that we know has nuclear weapons. What if China decided to invade Taiwan or North Korea decided to attack South Korea? What if the Saudi government was overthrown? These things aren't out of the realm of possibility.

Hopefully diplomacy will work and get these British soldiers back home soon. The last thing we want right now is yet another front in the 'war on terror'.

There was some discussion earlier as to previous examples of this kind of event. I didn't see the USS Pueblo mentioned.

Wiki Article on USS Pueblo. USS Pueblo was captured by North Korean forces in 1968.

Just FYI how it went down when I was a kid.

V/R,
Aries 1B

No it was a Navy patrol plane doing electronic surveillance (spying) off the coast of China reportable over international waters. A Chinese jet collided with it caused it to do an emergency landing on a Chinese island way down in the South. The jet and pilot were never seen again. China held the crew longer than they needed too and wouldn't allow the plane to be repaired and flown out. Instead the Russian brought in a plane large enough to fit the navy plane in it with the wings and tail pulled off. The whole thing was kind of silly on China's part.

Taiwan is separate from China. They have their own government separate from China although China doesn't consider is separate.

Anyway this thing with sounds like a he said she said where's the border type thing. Nothing will come of it but the neo-cons will be talking about for years.

Who's "we".

Well, exactly. It's so ironic that our military might becomes almost useless when faced with third-world guerrilla tactics - suicide bombers and road-side IEDs. I think I read a few years ago that because of the nature of these current wars, our special forces capabilities had been greatly expanded.

Really, special forces troops would be the best choice for rooting out guerrilla-style insurgencies. Sounds like 'that' is actually being done, according to the article I quoted above, with special forces units kidnapping high-level Iranian Revolutionary guard operatives.




I agree completely. In the first Iraq war, basically run by the generals, the coalition had overwhelming force, and were fighting a mostly conventional war against a conventional army. For this second Iraq war, it didn't help that the 4th Infantry Division was held up in the harbor in Turkey and wasn't permitted to debark. The loss of those forces, coupled with Rumsfeld's general desire to 'go light' with the number of troops in Baghdad and elsewhere, spelled disaster for a successful outcome from the very beginning.


Yes, any and all of these things should be planned for. I think the whole Pakistan scenario is the scariest and most volatile, because all that needs to fall is *one* domino - Musharraf - and then god knows what will happen.


I don't think Ahmadinejad is interested in diplomacy. He's basically a thug, and these sailors will be used to get what he wants in an international extortion scheme.


Yeah, I agree. I haven't checked lately, but don't we still have three carrier groups in the middle east right now?

Well, one (wo)man's thug is another person's leader of the free world. So it goes.

I predict Ahmadinejad will continue to stall/promise/excuse until backed into a corner. What that particular corner is I can't predict, though if we freeze the money I expect a semi-decisive reaction (I'll say 5 days). After that, he'll make noises about cutting off oil imports to the US. Of course, that can't happen on 43's watch, so without any monetary sanctions to rely on he'll throw the switch to [strike]invade[/strike]* 'step carefully into' Iran from the West.

This, of course, is filled with 'not good'. Iran will kick the US ass thoroughly and completely. The US, in it's ultimate hubris, will resort to nukes.

This is the way the world ends.


*wtf? I though y'all were down with teh Vb.

What part of the world has he been throwing his weight around in?

Where did he just have an unnecessary war?

Where has there been rumblings of the very same?

You do the math.

So, will Britain just let her men be hijacked from Iraqi waters? Just let diplomacy work? Let her men be put on trial? Apologize for an incursion? MoD will just bend over?

Did the stupid bastards in Iran who ordered this action talk to the Argentines first?

These weren't just British citizens kidnapped by Iran, these were coalition warfighters.

Before this incident, it could be argued that Iran was benign (while first ignoring the evidence that Iran is supplying the bad guys in Iraq, and that they might be working like hell for some kind of atomic/nuclear capability). Now...?

V/R,

Aries 1B

Wow... show trials seem to be in the air these days...

Iran ‘to try Britons for espionage’

First Chucky Schumer, now Ahmadinejad. Maybe we can get some others in on this? Ken Starr where are you? Fitz?

That is beyond the pale

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...y_expenditures

US - $532 billion/year
Iran - $6 billion/year

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...military_power

And most of those troops that Iran has are conscript troops, which are less effective

The world has never seen anything as devastating as the US Military when properly employed. The idea that a nation like Iran would be a challenge is, well, "interesting." We could win a war without putting a single boot on the ground. Now, the oil is another issue altogether...

A war with Iran would be easily winnable - not as easy as the first gulf war though due to the mountains. It is a bigger country than Iraq, and has more rugged terrain.

The only complication would be the rest of the world noticing that we were well on our way to an occupation of the whole middle east - they may have a problem with that.

Yea... let's get out of Iraq... just so we can get on with business in Iran- the financiers of Hamas, Iraq Insurgents, and Hezbollah. Time to clean house.

I can't help but notice that this story has all but disappeared from the headlines of CNN, ABC, Yahoo and the mainstream news sites, at the time of writing 9-25pm Pacific Time. Perhaps those Brits did stray (or were ordered) into Iranian territory, as Iran is now claiming, and they can really prove it. Is it realistic that the American public could conceive of the notion that Iran is actually telling the truth? Or have we all been programmed to think that they are liars/terrorists/evil/etc because we in the west have been programmed to think that all Islamic peoples are, by default, of such character?

Over the last year, there has been a relentless promotion by the US Government, via the media in their standard kow-tow-kneepad mode, of the notion that Iran has a "nuclear weapons program". Just like the issue of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" (!), the newspapers and TV are now resounding with the words of rightwing thinktanks, armchair generals, conservative commentators and "military experts and analysts", regurgitating White House copy ad nauseam. The UN is being similarly led by the nose, with little actual evidence to justify sanctions against Iran. It doesn't matter whether Iran is telling the truth, or otherwise about their nuclear ambitions. It doesn't matter whether their (nuclear) program is for peaceful use i.e. generating power, as claimed by the Iranian government, or for nuclear weapons, as claimed by Israel and its proxy, the Bush Administration. The endless repetition via the media that Iran "has a nuclear weapons program" is enough to instill into the public psyche that this is truly the case. Snd how much time and energy do the general public have, in order to delve and research the facts for themselves?

Reality has nothing to do with this controversy: The ground was broken in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks, when the US (and allies) declared war on the world's Islamic peoples, under the guise of a "war on terrorism". The upcoming war (in the form of massive air strikes rather than a ground invasion) against Iran was part of the September 2000 plan by the NeoCons; they WILL get their 3rd desired war of the planned series. If the current British troops fracas isn't the trigger that starts the ball rolling, then there will be some other incident, either real or manufactured.

The bottom line: the Bush Administration WILL launch some kind of war against Iran within the next year (or sooner), and there is nothing anyone or any nation will be able to do in order to stop this from happening. In the end, Iran's alleged nuclear sites and military facilities will be destroyed and flattened beyond all recognition, so any evidence (real, or imaginary, according to one's political leanings) that Iran was manufacturing nukes will never be proven, one way or the other, and all we will have to go on will be our undying faith in the Bush Administration's claim that they were telling the truth. Despite the improbability of a more dishonest and untrustworthy government than the Blair and Bush administrations have showed themselves to be during the last 5.5 years, the public will, as usual, be placated.

The point being, the Bush Administration/neocons have the power to do whatever they want. Even if they mess up to the nth degree, as in Iraq, "accountability" is not in our current system's vocabulary.

The other bottom line re. the imminent Iran war is "cui bono"? Will anyone of note ever dare ask that question?