WASHINGTON - Name, rank, serial number and
your signature on the dotted line. No sooner had
Britain's 15 "kidnapped" sailors and marines
returned from their harrowing "hostage" experience
at the hands of Iran than some were lining up to
sell their stories to the British press.
And no sooner had they been accused of
"acting like reality-TV stars" than they became a
punching bag for neo-conservatives and other
right-wing hawks in the United States who cast the
sailors' "humiliating" behavior and their
government's equally
"bungled" response as an
affront to the Anglosphere and its interests in
the Middle East.
"If there has ever in
history been a faster, more humiliating submission
to Stockholm syndrome, we're unaware of it," read
an editorial in the New York Post, a
neo-conservative daily owned by Australian-born
Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. "But aren't
British service personnel trained for this sort of
thing?"
Mark Steyn, a neo-conservative
syndicated columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times,
was equally unimpressed when he wrote, "The
Queen's Navee had been demobbed. The token gal was
dressed up as an Islamic woman, and the 14 men had
been kitted out in [Iranian President Mahmud]
Ahmadinejad's leisurewear."
The details of
training for hostage situations are kept secret,
according to Britain's Defense Ministry. If the
Iranian government's sophisticated tactics of
coercion are any indication, the training would
not have made much of a difference anyway.
Iran used the British sailors - captured
last month by members of Iran's Revolutionary
Guards as they patrolled the Shatt-al-Arab
waterway - as a propaganda tool. They paraded them
in front of Iran's state-run media and coerced
confessions from them.
But the British
government may have been just as eager to
manipulate Iran's tawdry stunt to its advantage.
Its first step? Cite "exceptional circumstances"
and allow the sailors to sell their version of
events to the British media.
However, the
window of opportunity to cash in was short-lived,
as the Ministry of Defense on Monday banned any
more sailors from profiting from their captivity.
That was after the lone female sailor, Leading
Seaman Faye Turney, 26, reportedly struck deals
worth more than 100,000 pounds (about US$200,000)
with British channel ITV1 for her story, and after
Arthur Batchelor, 20, the youngest of the sailors,
told The Daily Mirror that he "cried like a baby"
in his prison cell.
"A guard kept flicking
my neck with his index finger and thumb. I thought
the worst. We've all seen the videos," said
Batchelor in the same interview, perhaps referring
to decapitation videos made by clandestine
terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda, the most
notorious of which captured the murders of
American businessman Nicholas Berg and Wall Street
Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
Iran has
not been implicated in the creation or
distribution of decapitation videos popularized by
Sunni extremist groups in Iraq. In response to
Britain's vigorous defense that the sailors "acted
with immense courage and dignity", the same New
York Post editorial remarked, "That's just icing
on the capitulation cake - adding to a humiliation
that will have consequences far into the future."
It's the consequences of Britain's
ostensible "soft power" approach with Iran that
enrage neo-conservative columnists such as Charles
Krauthammer the most. For him, the "humiliation"
suffered by the British is evidence that the
international community and "its great
institutions" are a sham, and that multilateralism
is a dead end.
"You want your people back?
Go to the [European Union] and get stiffed. Go to
the [United Nations] Security Council and get a
statement that refuses even to 'deplore' this act
of piracy," he wrote in the Washington Post. "Then
turn to the despised Americans. They'll deal you
some cards and bail you out."
With 136
British servicemen and women killed in Iraq, the
British government announced in February a new
timetable for withdrawing much of its 7,000-strong
force from the war-torn country. Prime Minister
Tony Blair told the House of Commons that 3,000 of
those soldiers will have left southern Iraq by the
end of 2007.
Britain's announcement came
as the administration of US President George W
Bush sent 21,100 more troops to Iraq, and the
standoff between Iran and Britain over the
detained sailors brought a new complication for
Blair, who wants to tiptoe out of Basra before the
situation gets out of hand.
Other
neo-conservative hawks have seized on Britain's
"bungled" diplomatic response as an argument for
unilateral action and a warning for Iran's future
dealings with the international community with
regard to its nuclear aspirations.
In an
op-ed piece in The Financial Times, former US
ambassador to the UN John Bolton excoriated the
British Foreign Office: "This passive, hesitant,
almost acquiescent approach barely concealed the
Foreign Office's real objective: keeping the faint
hope alive that three years of failed negotiations
on Iran's nuclear-weapons program would not suffer
another, this time possibly fatal, setback."
Fox News got in on the act too, framing
the debate of the returning sailors in terms of
whether they are heroes or cowards.
"There's no way to put a good face on
this, the kissy-face with Ahmadinejad, the goodie
bags, this was a real failure of leadership." said
Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters to Neil Cavuto of
Fox. "A US service member would not accept that
goodie bag, wouldn't profusely in front of the
cameras thank the Iranian president."
Lieutenant-Colonel Bob Maginnis, another
Fox "expert" and contributor to a Christian radio
program called Jimmy DeYoung's Prophecy Today
Weekly, labeled the British sailors "cowards".
"It looks like Holiday in Tehran ... They
were standing in front of Ahmadinejad, and you
know they were thanking him for their kind
treatment, for letting them go ... He was giving
them Persian candy and all sorts of souvenirs to
take home."
But neo-conservative CNN
talk-show pundit Glen Beck summed it up most
eloquently when he proclaimed, "Iran played
chicken with the West and we blinked."
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
