British Ministry of Defense Feels A Draft

After being caught with their pants down. Hopefully you remember the incident in the Persian Gulf where 14 British sailors were arrested by the Iranians for violating their territorial waters. Publicly the British cried foul, but the heroic Times of London proved that the Brits knew they screwed up all along. Here is what really happened.

Newly released Ministry of Defence documents state that:

— The arrests took place in waters that are not internationally agreed as Iraqi;

— The coalition unilaterally designated a dividing line between Iraqi and Iranian waters in the Gulf without telling Iran where it was;

— The Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ coastal protection vessels were crossing this invisible line at a rate of three times a week; It was the British who apparently raised their weapons first before the Iranian gunboats came alongside;

— The cornered British, surrounded by heavily armed Iranians, made a hopeless last-minute radio plea for a helicopter to come back and provide air cover.

Wow. I hope someone is fired over this. Ahmadinejad has his issues, but he was smart enough to treat the captured sailors well once he realized that he was going to be on the winning side of the dispute. I don't think Bush and his ilk are nearly that clever.

Irony Is Lost On This Guy

Check out this article from the Associated Press. Here are the key quotes from his trip to the UAE.

Dubai has a powerful Iranian business community, and the West, led by the United States, is cracking down on business in and out of Iran to protest against its nuclear ambitions. Dubai is caught in the middle — eager to maintain its lucrative business with Iran, but wary of angering the United States and the United Nations.

So Bush is putting pressure on Dubai to stop allowing Iranians to use the city-state to make an end run around sanctions effecting business. All because the Iranians want nuclear power - the US doesn't want Iran to have nuclear anything.

Later in the article comes this gem.

At an exhibit on energy economy in the Gulf, Bush praised the United Arab Emirates federation for examining how to move beyond a reliance on oil.

"It's amazing, isn't it?" Bush said. "This country has gotten its wealth from the ground and is now reinvesting in alternative forms of energy."

So Bush says Iran must run everything on oil, that all scientists admit won't last forever, while the UAE is praised for avoiding that fate?

If Bush could actually recognize irony - I honestly think foreign policy wouldn't be such a mess. I guess irony was only discussed in Honors English at Yale.

When Are We Gonna Light This Candle?

Patrick Foy over at Taki's Top Drawer has a great article on the growing probability of a full scale war with Iran. Here is a key passage discussing President Ahmadinejad's recent visit to Columbia University in NYC.

The New York tabloids, the fashion plates reading the news at the cable networks, and the more expensive ones at the non-cable networks, and all leading presidential candidates had the same reaction to Ahmadinejad’s visit. One wonders if they were handed the same script and talking points, prepared in one central office. More likely, they just knew what was expected of them. The commentators brought in from the “think tanks” to elevate the discussion were ready to have a cow. These “experts” sputtered predictable, unenlightened accusations at Ahmadinejad, repeating ad nauseam that he is a dictator (preposterous) as well as a “Holocaust denier” (a deliberate distortion), that Iran is working feverishly to acquire nuclear weapons (flat out untrue) which will be used “to wipe Israel off the map” (a mistranslation and another distortion), et cetera. Faced with such hysteria, one could be forgiven for thinking that the world was about to spin off its axis.

It's funny, only online do we learn the reality that many of the key quotes from Ahmadinejad about Israel and the Holocaust were mistranslations and distortions. Not that they matter anyway, but they do whip up the war fever among folks who don't bother to check if the talking heads are telling the truth or spitting bs.