What happened to the vaunted British navy?
Speaking of “paper tigers”, the British in general and their navy in particular are looking weak-willed and uncertain in the face of Iranian grand-standing with these hostages. From the New York Post:
The latest report is that the Britons were ready to fight off their abductors. Certainly their escorting ship, HMS Cornwall, could have blown the Iranian naval vessel out of the water. However, at the last minute the British Ministry of Defense ordered the Cornwall not to fire, and her captain and crew were forced to watch their shipmates led away into captivity.
Nice.
The Iranians have claimed that the event happened in Iranian waters, but the British have produced GPS tracking reports that prove otherwise. Interestingly enough, when the Iranians initially gave the GPS location the Brits were captured in, it also was in Iraqi waters! They quickly changed the location when this fact was pointed out by the UK government. Here’s the Associated Press illustration.
Here’s the British response to the location of the event:
British Vice Adm. Charles Style said the global positioning system on the ship proves the vessel was “clearly” 1.7 nautical miles inside Iraqi waters and that the boat was “ambushed” by the Iranian forces.
Iran insists the ship was inside its territorial waters and, according to Style, provided a map with coordinates on Saturday in attempts to prove the point.
Blair said those coordinates actually “turned out to confirm they were in Iraqi waters,” and Iraq has supported that position.
Iran on Wednesday provided different coordinates that placed the vessel inside Iranian waters.
The “change of coordinates,” Style said, “is hard to legitimate.”
Even if the ship had somehow strayed into Iranian waters, Beckett said, “under international law, warships have sovereign immunity in the territorial sea of other states.”
According to MEMRI, this abduction was a planned event - hoping to use the sailors as bargaining chips to get back those Iranian intelligence personnel captured by U.S. forces in Iraq.
Of course, some “truthers” think this is all a planned, staged event by Pres. Bush to find an excuse to go to war with Iran. Rosie O’Donnell, as usual, seems to be the spokesperson for that little group. Nevermind that the Iranians admit to doing it.
All this comes at the same time that the UK government has announced that they are severely reducing the size of their navy. What once was a might force that helped defeat the German, Italian, and Japanese navies during WWII; and which patrolled their former empire’s waters for hundreds of years, is now an empty shell of itself - and getting smaller.
It’s been a tough month for the British Navy. On March 7, it learned that Tony Blair’s Labor government was going ahead with drastic cuts in its budget and number of ships. By this time next year, the once-vaunted Royal Navy will be about the size of the Belgian Navy, while its officers face a five-year moratorium on all promotions.
UPDATE - Here’s the video from Iranian TV of the parade of hostages. Nice that they are getting fed, no?
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