More on Britain’s lose-lose in Iran
The conventional wisdom is coming around:
Wise people learn early on that, whether dealing with business rivals or flaky Middle Eastern regimes or merely with you own recalcitrant children, you should never utter threats you can’t enforce.Our prime minister forgot that elementary lesson. It was perfectly clear that there was nothing that London could do in military terms to chastise Tehran. Does even John Bolton think that the Black Watch regiment should have marched from Basra to Shiraz or that the Royal Air Force should have bombed Tehran? By taking the question to the U.N. Security Council and the European Union, Blair invited humiliation, which he duly received, and in the process he turned an incident into a crisis.
There have been other painful reminders of how diminished our authority is. While the pacifist left doesn’t think our forces should have been in the Persian Gulf in the first place, the patriotic right have been dismayed by the conduct of those talkative hostages, with their continual expressions of penitence for having done the wrong thing and of gratitude toward their captors. That culminated when one of these brave lads told Ahmadinejad yesterday, “We are very grateful for your forgiveness.”
Sad, indeed. The patriotic right — there is still such a thing in England? — is probably most dismayed of all that Blair had the nerve to put troops such as this in harms’ way in order to maintain the illusion of Britain as a world power, and in the process demonstrated very much the opposite.
As I said before, he probably deserves better. I’m not sure England does.
UPDATE: Mickey Kaus says pooh-pooh — how much more of a climb-down could a hawk want here? That’s post-facto thinking, Mickey. It is humiliating, not not humiliating but yes humiliating, to have your military personnel captured without a fight, paraded before TV cameras and made to “apologize” on television. Did Iran also get egg on its face? Yes. Is this a “victory” for the Anglophone Alliance? Hardly.
April 6th, 2007 at 8:40 am
What’s with the picture of Chamberlain? Blair is what…an appeaser? That doesn’t seem to be what you’re saying, but what the hell do I know about semiotics anyway.
And while we’re on the subject, what’s with all the pictures of Pelosi with the head scarf (yet another instance of it on today’s WSJ op-ed page)? In my book it’s like an anti-Semitic Bush hater showing a picture of POTUS wearing a kipa.
April 6th, 2007 at 9:55 am
If you read the article at Slate you’ll understand about Chamberlain.
Wasn’t she just wearing that tichel so that’s what the picture shows?
April 6th, 2007 at 11:06 am
Come on Ron. I was born at night but I wasn’t born last night.
The WSJ put the picture on their front page (upper left, above the masthead) and again on the op-ed page (where we were reminded in the text that she had gone to Syria and “donned a head scarf”). Drudge ran the identical picture for days. And those are just two of the news sources that I can name off the top of my head.
Get serious — what going on here?
April 6th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
Well, in all seriousness, I’m not Matt Drudge or the editor of the Wall Street Journal, so I can’t answer for them, but I don’t think there’s much going on here. It’s newsworthy when someone looks different from how she usually does, but beyond that it’s pretty meaningless to me. She’s being culturally sensitive, as she should be in Syria. Politically and morally insensitive, of course, but that’s another story.