Shiver me traitors
A couple of observations on the Navy hostage crisis. First, the Americans who are posting that the sailors should have put up a heroic resistance to the Iranians are, it barely needs to be said, idiots. The correct response to being arrested in disputed waters is not to start a full-on gunfight, risking your and others' lives. That's demented. The British commander is to be commended on his action, not condemned. Trusting in the political authorities to resolve the crisis, rather than breaking his rules of engagement and attacking the forces of a nation we are not at war with, was exactly the right thing to do. Neither are the sailors traitors for not resisting interrogation with squarejawed stoicism. We do not require our military to die rather than appear on Iranian TV. The sailors correctly figured out that no one back home watching them would think it was anything but bullshit. They clearly remember, as I do, captured pilots in the Gulf War appearing on TV. They were not reprimanded in the press for it, because we understand that there is nothing heroic in getting yourself killed over being used as an item of propaganda.Second, the MOD's decision to allow the sailors to sell their stories has a clear motivation. The West has taken a spanking in the Arab world over this issue. This is how the Iranians are selling it: when the West takes captives, it tortures them, even if they are innocent; but, look, we took these spies inside our territorial waters and gave them a nice kebab. I heard a journo from Al Quds say exactly that. All the coverage of the crisis has been led by the Iranians. They shot all the footage and it showed happy, joking, smoking sailors. They know their propaganda is see-through but it has done the job because it's the only message out there. The Westerners have been left with empty posturing. To top it off, an Iranian envoy released at about the same time reported that he had been tortured. Whether he had or not, people are going to believe it.
But the MOD is not completely stuffed with people who were born yesterday. It knows that if the sailors have been offered five-, six-figure sums for their stories, they are not being paid to say they had a nice time in Teheran. Iran are not alone in being interested in propaganda. The MOD figures that a couple of weeks of My Time in Iranian Hellhole should redress the message balance.
posted by Dr Zen @ 9:39 am
5 Comments:
sigh. who can you trust? remember the happy days when every word your government said was true? no? me neither.
it's all theatre, except the bush regime has been caught in lies and brutality that competence usually manages to obscure, and blair's absurd propensity to get near the rod of power at any cost is calling into question his sexual orientation even more than his competence. so they will lose any propaganda struggle in the middle east, and a fair few english speakers quit listening in recent years.
the countries of the middle east have been greatly strengthened by the bush/blair regimes. it is now clear that the usmc can go where it pleases- but can't stay there. if it were not for the economic power the security council can wield, iran would have nothing to fear. that is why they need nuclear weapons: not to expunge israel, but simply to sit at the head table, of nations that can not be invaded, and should not be isolated.
I've seen none of the claims the sailors should have resisted. I don't seek out such material. I always wondered why they were so compliant. Now as we hear of their individual experiences, we can try to understand. I should think it a very rare human indeed who could remain unsusceptible to psychological pressures such as the Iranians brought to bear. The destruction of will is an ancient science, and all it requires is control, isolation, and subtle hints. The captive destroys himself.
More bluntly, if I were captured near the Iraq-Iran border, and my captors were perhaps not entirely clear they were proper representatives of Iran but let me believe they might be insurgents of a sort, and they teased me by flicking at my jugular or measuring me for a coffin, I'd snap in no time and apologize all day long if it seemed to make them happy.
The British commander is to be commended on his action, not condemned.
There have been, rightly or wrongly, few times in my life when I have felt completely justified in expressing a national pride - but this is one of them. Every day I thank the world's lucky stars that the service personnel in question were under British military rule and not American.
Yes, it seems your boys handled themselves quite rightly. I also have not seen any clamor for them apologizing. You say what you have to to stay alive and try to get out. And it seems they were not only smart, but also clever in the way they composed their statements.
Pretty impressive.
And if anyone thinks that an American unit would have behaved differently, they're listening to the wrong news sources.
Don, I think it's quite simply understood why they were "compliant". There is no reason to invoke torture or the threat of it either. First, they were captured by a power we are not at war with, and have no reason to "resist" them. They could -- rightly as it turns out -- rely on the political powers to sort their fate out. Second, they were doubtless aware that they were doing something of dubious legality. I expect the Iranians put that to them. No harm in apologising when someone thinks you have broken their law, if that's what it takes to keep you out of the slammer. I don't think the newspaper pieces will be particularly revealing for two reasons. One, their confinement probably wasn't very dramatic. So two, they and, particularly, the journos that interview them, will feel it necessary to sex it up a bit. They'll roughen up the treatment and impute motives to the captors. "They treated us pretty well and the interrogation was no worse than you'd get in the copshop after being hauled in for D and D" will not cause the requisite outrage in the readers.
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