|
Korean Job Discussion Forums
"The Internet's Meeting Place for ESL/EFL Teachers from Around the World!"
|
| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
|
 Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2007 10:08 pm Post subject: |
 |
|
| Nowhere Man wrote: |
| So, "the right" offers something different? |
I am going to break my rule about not responding to your provocations because, even though this "question" likely aims to "expose" something about me and my views, this nevertheless presents a good opportunity to clarify your presuppositions.
Whoever said I had any love affair with the right, Nowhere Man? I have come to see both sides as hopelessly, pathologically corrupt -- although good men and women can still be found on either side of the aisle. And I side with them (Gates, Obama, McCain, Lieberman, for example.)
Perhaps leftist politics -- and more importantly to me, leftist scholarship -- has alienated me from "the left." But my not standing in their camp does not mean that I reject all of their issues and positions any more than my standing with the other side at the moment means I embrace everything they think and say.
Let the Democratic Party nominate Obama and then see where I stand.
Last edited by Gopher on Fri Mar 30, 2007 10:15 pm; edited 3 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
EFLtrainer
Joined: 04 May 2005
|
| Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2007 10:08 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Reading the new pages on the thread - from about 6 to this page - I see numerous references to Iran invading Iraqi waters. What is the basis for the claim? (I wasn't aware the issue of whose waters they were in was settled. If it has, please link. ) Is everyone relying on the The British coords and map released? If so...
Brits in the Gulf and a Doctored British Map?
| Quote: |
Former British Ambassador Craig Murray is now challenging the legitimacy of the map just published by the British government in the current dispute with Iran over those 15 captured British sailors and marines...
"A) The Iran/Iraq maritime boundary shown on the British government map does not exist. It has been drawn up by the British Government. Only Iraq and Iran can agree their bilateral boundary, and they never have done this in the Gulf, only inside the Shatt because there it is the land border too. This published boundary is a fake with no legal force.
"B) Accepting the British coordinates for the position of both HMS Cornwall and the incident, both were closer to Iranian land than Iraqi land. Go on, print out the map and measure it. Which underlines the point that the British produced border is not a reliable one..." |
Also, it has been stated that regardless, Iran has violate international law. If the Brits were in Iranian or disputed waters, how did Iran break international law? (This is not a rhetorical question.) What law states that a military vessel violating a nation's sovereignty cannot be boarded? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
|
| Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2007 10:17 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| EFLtrainer wrote: |
| What law states that a military vessel violating a nation's sovereignty cannot be boarded? |
BLT, were Tehran and London at war or at peace when the Iranians boarded and seized this vessel and its crew...? (And this is a rhetorical question.)
Maritime Law 101. Rules, standards, and international norms differ in war and peace. What legal basis can the Iranian government cite that might tend to legitimate its seizing British sailors, marines from a British-flagged vessel operating openly, and during peacetime, in the Gulf...?
What is next? Going to claim the British defected, are you...? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
thepeel
Joined: 08 Aug 2004
|
| Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2007 11:43 pm Post subject: |
|
|
EFL, do you know what the Geneva conventions are? Do you know the procedure involved here? If not, don't speak.
Iran is doing this because the faux 'international system' doesn't punish anyone for anything. iran got away with it 28 years ago and will get away with it again now. They have no respect for anybody and diplomacy will not work.
See below for a real, honest take on what is happening by an uber-accurate Mark Steyn.
| Quote: |
If you divide the world into geographical regions, then, Iran�s neither here nor there. But if you divide it ideologically, the mullahs are ideally positioned at the center of the various provinces of Islam�the Arabs, the Turks, the Stans, and the south Asians. Who better to unite the Muslim world under one inspiring, courageous leadership? If there�s going to be an Islamic superpower, Tehran would seem to be the obvious candidate.
That moment of ascendancy is now upon us. Or as the Daily Telegraph in London reported: �Iran�s hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies.� Hmm. I�m not a professional mullah, so I can�t speak to the theological soundness of the argument, but it seems a religious school in the Holy City of Qom has ruled that �the use of nuclear weapons may not constitute a problem, according to sharia.� Well, there�s a surprise. How do you solve a problem? Like, sharia! It�s the one-stop shop for justifying all your geopolitical objectives.
The bad cop/worse cop routine the mullahs and their hothead President Ahmadinejad are playing in this period of alleged negotiation over Iran�s nuclear program is the best indication of how all negotiations with Iran will go once they�re ready to fly. This is the nuclear version of the NRA bumper sticker: �Guns Don�t Kill People. People Kill People.� Nukes don�t nuke nations. Nations nuke nations. When the Argentine junta seized British sovereign territory in the Falklands, the generals knew that the United Kingdom was a nuclear power, but they also knew that under no conceivable scenario would Her Majesty�s Government drop the big one on Buenos Aires. The Argie generals were able to assume decency on the part of the enemy, which is a useful thing to be able to do.
But in any contretemps with Iran the other party would be foolish to make a similar assumption. That will mean the contretemps will generally be resolved in Iran�s favor. In fact, if one were a Machiavellian mullah, the first thing one would do after acquiring nukes would be to hire some obvious loon like President Ahmaddamatree to front the program. He�s the equivalent of the yobbo in the English pub who says, �Oy, mate, you lookin� at my bird?� You haven�t given her a glance, or him; you�re at the other end of the bar head down in the Daily Mirror, trying not to catch his eye. You don�t know whether he�s longing to nut you in the face or whether he just gets a kick out of terrifying you into thinking he wants to. But, either way, you just want to get out of the room in one piece. Kooks with nukes is one-way deterrence squared.
If Belgium becomes a nuclear power, the Dutch have no reason to believe it would be a factor in, say, negotiations over a joint highway project. But Iran�s nukes will be a factor in everything. If you think, for example, the European Union and others have been fairly craven over those Danish cartoons, imagine what they�d be like if a nuclear Tehran had demanded a formal apology, a suitable punishment for the newspaper, and blasphemy laws specifically outlawing representations of the Prophet. Iran with nukes will be a suicide bomber with a radioactive waist.
If we�d understood Iran back in 1979, we�d understand better the challenges we face today. Come to that, we might not even be facing them. But, with hindsight, what strikes you about the birth of the Islamic Republic is the near total lack of interest by analysts in that adjective: Islamic. Iran was only the second Islamist state, after Saudi Arabia�and, in selecting as their own qualifying adjective the family name, the House of Saud at least indicated a conventional sense of priorities, as the legions of Saudi princes whoring and gambling in the fleshpots of the West have demonstrated exhaustively. Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue�though, as the Royal Family has belatedly discovered vis-�-vis the Islamists, they�re somewhat overdrawn on that front. The difference in Iran is simple: with the mullahs, there are no London escort agencies on retainer to supply blondes only. When they say �Islamic Republic,� they mean it. And refusing to take their words at face value has bedeviled Western strategists for three decades.
Twenty-seven years ago, because Islam didn�t fit into the old cold war template, analysts mostly discounted it. We looked at the map like that Broadway marquee: West and East, the old double act. As with most of the down-page turf, Iran�s significance lay in which half of the act she�d sign on with. To the Left, the shah was a high-profile example of an unsavory U.S. client propped up on traditional he-may-be-a-sonofabitch-but-he�s-our-sonofabitch grounds: in those heady days SAVAK, his secret police, were a household name among Western progressives, and insofar as they took the stern-faced man in the turban seriously, they assured themselves he was a kind of novelty front for the urbane Paris �migr� socialists who accompanied him back to Tehran. To the realpolitik Right, the issue was Soviet containment: the shah may be our sonofabitch, but he�d outlived his usefulness, and a weak Iran could prove too tempting an invitation to Moscow to fulfill the oldest of czarist dreams�a warm-water port, not to mention control of the Straits of Hormuz. Very few of us considered the strategic implications of an Islamist victory on its own terms�the notion that Iran was checking the neither-of-the-above box and that that box would prove a far greater threat to the Freeish World than Communism.
But that was always Iran�s plan. In 1989, with the Warsaw Pact disintegrating before his eyes, poor beleaguered Mikhail Gorbachev received a helpful bit of advice from the cocky young upstart on the block: �I strongly urge that in breaking down the walls of Marxist fantasies you do not fall into the prison of the West and the Great Satan,� Ayatollah Khomeini wrote to Moscow. �I openly announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the greatest and most powerful base of the Islamic world, can easily help fill up the ideological vacuum of your system.�
Today many people in the West don�t take that any more seriously than Gorbachev did. But it�s pretty much come to pass. As Communism retreated, radical Islam seeped into Africa and south Asia and the Balkans. Crazy guys holed up in Philippine jungles and the tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay who�d have been �Marxist fantasists� a generation or two back are now Islamists: it�s the ideology du jour. At the point of expiry of the Soviet Union in 1991, the peoples of the central Asian republics were for the most part unaware that Iran had even had an �Islamic revolution�; 15 years on, following the proselytizing of thousands of mullahs dispatched to the region by a specially created Iranian government agency, the Stans� traditionally moderate and in many cases alcoholically lubricated form of Islam is yielding in all but the most remote areas to a fiercer form imported from the south. As the Pentagon has begun to notice, in Iraq Tehran has been quietly duplicating the strategy that delivered southern Lebanon into its control 20 years ago. The degeneration of Baby Assad�s supposedly �secular� Baathist tyranny into full-blown client status and the replacement of Arafat�s depraved �secular� kleptocrat terrorists by Hamas�s even more depraved Islamist terrorists can also be seen as symptoms of Iranification.
So as a geopolitical analyst the ayatollah is not to be disdained. Our failure to understand Iran in the seventies foreshadowed our failure to understand the broader struggle today. As clashes of civilizations go, this one�s between two extremes: on the one hand, a world that has everything it needs to wage decisive war�wealth, armies, industry, technology; on the other, a world that has nothing but pure ideology and plenty of believers. (Its sole resource, oil, would stay in the ground were it not for foreign technology, foreign manpower, and a Western fetishization of domestic environmental aesthetics.)
For this to be a mortal struggle, as the cold war was, the question is: Are they a credible enemy to us?
For a projection of the likely outcome, the question is: Are we a credible enemy to them?
A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it�s dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us? If you add to the advantages of will and manpower a nuclear capability, the odds shift dramatically.
What, after all, is the issue underpinning every little goofy incident in the news, from those Danish cartoons of Mohammed to recommendations for polygamy by official commissions in Canada to the banning of the English flag in English prisons because it�s an insensitive �crusader� emblem to the introduction of gender-segregated swimming sessions in municipal pools in Puget Sound? In a word, sovereignty. There is no god but Allah, and thus there is no jurisdiction but Allah�s. Ayatollah Khomeini saw himself not as the leader of a geographical polity but as a leader of a communal one: Islam. Once those urbane socialist �migr�s were either dead or on the plane back to Paris, Iran�s nominally �temporal� government took the same view, too: its role is not merely to run national highway departments and education ministries but to advance the cause of Islam worldwide.
If you dust off the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, Article One reads: �The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.� Iran fails to meet qualification (d), and has never accepted it. The signature act of the new regime was not the usual post-coup bloodletting and summary execution of the shah�s mid-ranking officials but the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by �students� acting with Khomeini�s blessing. Diplomatic missions are recognized as the sovereign territory of that state, and the violation thereof is an act of war. No one in Washington has to fret that Fidel Castro will bomb the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. Even in the event of an actual war, the diplomatic staff of both countries would be allowed to depart.
Yet Iran seized protected persons on U.S. soil and held them prisoner for over a year�ostensibly because Washington was planning to restore the shah. But the shah died and the hostages remained. And, when the deal was eventually done and the hostages were released, the sovereign territory of the United States remained in the hands of the gangster regime. Granted that during the Carter administration the Soviets were gobbling up real estate from Afghanistan to Grenada, it�s significant that in this wretched era the only loss of actual U.S. territory was to the Islamists.
Yet Iran paid no price. They got away with it. For the purposes of comparison, in 1980, when the U.S. hostages in Tehran were in their sixth month of captivity, Iranians opposed to the mullahs seized the Islamic Republic�s embassy in London. After six days of negotiation, Her Majesty�s Government sent SAS commandos into the building and restored it to the control of the regime. In refusing to do the same with the �students� occupying the U.S. embassy, the Islamic Republic was explicitly declaring that it was not as other states.
We expect multilateral human-rights Democrats to be unsatisfactory on assertive nationalism, but if they won�t even stand up for international law, what�s the point? Jimmy Carter should have demanded the same service as Tehran got from the British�the swift resolution of the situation by the host government�and, if none was forthcoming, Washington should have reversed the affront to international order quickly, decisively, and in a sufficiently punitive manner. At hinge moments of history, there are never good and bad options, only bad and much much worse. Our options today are significantly worse because we didn�t take the bad one back then.
With the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, a British subject, Tehran extended its contempt for sovereignty to claiming jurisdiction over the nationals of foreign states, passing sentence on them, and conscripting citizens of other countries to carry it out. Iran�s supreme leader instructed Muslims around the world to serve as executioners of the Islamic Republic�and they did, killing not Rushdie himself but his Japanese translator, and stabbing the Italian translator, and shooting the Italian publisher, and killing three dozen persons with no connection to the book when a mob burned down a hotel because of the presence of the novelist�s Turkish translator.
Iran�s de facto head of state offered a multimillion-dollar bounty for a whack job on an obscure English novelist. And, as with the embassy siege, he got away with it.
In the latest variation on Marx�s dictum, history repeats itself: first, the unreadable London literary novel; then, the Danish funny pages. But in the 17 years between the Rushdie fatwa and the cartoon jihad, what was supposedly a freakish one-off collision between Islam and the modern world has become routine. We now think it perfectly normal for Muslims to demand the tenets of their religion be applied to society at large: the government of Sweden, for example, has been zealously closing down websites that republish those Danish cartoons. As Khomeini�s successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, has said, �It is in our revolution�s interest, and an essential principle, that when we speak of Islamic objectives, we address all the Muslims of the world.� Or as a female Muslim demonstrator in Toronto put it: �We won�t stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.�
If that�s a little too ferocious, Kofi Annan framed it rather more soothingly: �The offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were first published in a European country which has recently acquired a significant Muslim population, and is not yet sure how to adjust to it.�
If you�ve also �recently acquired� a significant Muslim population and you�re not sure how to �adjust� to it, well, here�s the difference: back when my Belgian grandparents emigrated to Canada, the idea was that the immigrants assimilated to the host country. As Kofi and Co. see it, today the host country has to assimilate to the immigrants: if Islamic law forbids representations of the Prophet, then so must Danish law, and French law, and American law. Iran was the progenitor of this rapacious extraterritoriality, and, if we had understood it more clearly a generation ago, we might be in less danger of seeing large tracts of the developed world being subsumed by it today.
Yet instead the West somehow came to believe that, in a region of authoritarian monarchs and kleptocrat dictators, Iran was a comparative beacon of liberty. The British foreign secretary goes to Tehran and hangs with the mullahs and, even though he�s not a practicing Muslim (yet), ostentatiously does that �peace be upon him� thing whenever he mentions the Prophet Mohammed. And where does the kissy-face with the A-list imams get him? Ayatollah Khamenei renewed the fatwa on Rushdie only last year. True, President Bush identified Iran as a member of the axis of evil, but a year later the country was being hailed as a �democracy� by then-deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage and a nation that has seen a �democratic flowering,� as State Department spokesman Richard Boucher put it.
And let�s not forget Bill Clinton�s extraordinary remarks at Davos last year: �Iran today is, in a sense, the only country where progressive ideas enjoy a vast constituency. It is there that the ideas that I subscribe to are defended by a majority.� That�s true in the very narrow sense that there�s a certain similarity between his legal strategy and sharia when it comes to adultery and setting up the gals as the fall guys. But it seems Clinton apparently had a more general commonality in mind: �In every single election, the guys I identify with got two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.� America�s first black President is beginning to sound like America�s first Islamist ex-president.
Those remarks are as nutty as Gerald Ford�s denial of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe. Iran has an impressive three-decade record of talking the talk and walking the walk�either directly or through client groups like Hezbollah. In 1994, the Argentine Israel Mutual Association was bombed in Buenos Aires. Nearly 100 people died and 250 were injured�the worst massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. An Argentine court eventually issued warrants for two Iranian diplomats plus Ali Fallahian, former intelligence minister, and Ali Akbar Parvaresh, former education minister and deputy speaker of the Majlis.
Why blow up a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires? Because it�s there. Unlike the Iranian infiltration into Bosnia and Croatia, which helped radicalize not just the local populations but Muslim supporters from Britain and Western Europe, the random slaughter in the Argentine has no strategic value except as a demonstration of muscle and reach.
Anyone who spends half an hour looking at Iranian foreign policy over the last 27 years sees five things:
1. contempt for the most basic international conventions;
2. long-reach extraterritoriality;
3. effective promotion of radical Pan-Islamism;
4. a willingness to go the extra mile for Jew-killing (unlike, say, Osama);
5. an all-but-total synchronization between rhetoric and action.
Yet the Europeans remain in denial. Iran was supposedly the Middle Eastern state they could work with. And the chancellors and foreign ministers jetted in to court the mullahs so assiduously that they�re reluctant to give up on the strategy just because a relatively peripheral figure like the, er, head of state is sounding off about Armageddon.
Instead, Western analysts tend to go all Kremlinological. There are, after all, many factions within Iran�s ruling class. What the country�s quick-on-the-nuke president says may not be the final word on the regime�s position. Likewise, what the school of nuclear theologians in Qom says. Likewise, what former president Khatami says. Likewise, what Iran�s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, says.
But, given that they�re all in favor of the country having nukes, the point seems somewhat moot. The question then arises, what do they want them for?
By way of illustration, consider the country�s last presidential election. The final round offered a choice between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an alumnus of the U.S. Embassy siege a quarter-century ago, and Hashemi Rafsanjani, head of the Expediency Council, which sounds like an EU foreign policy agency but is, in fact, the body that arbitrates between Iran�s political and religious leaderships. Ahmadinejad is a notorious shoot-from-the-lip apocalyptic hothead who believes in the return of the Twelfth (hidden) Imam and quite possibly that he personally is his designated deputy, and he�s also claimed that when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly last year a mystical halo appeared and bathed him in its aura. Ayatollah Rafsanjani, on the other hand, is one of those famous �moderates.�
What�s the difference between a hothead and a moderate? Well, the extremist Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be �wiped off the map,� while the moderate Rafsanjani has declared that Israel is �the most hideous occurrence in history,� which the Muslim world �will vomit out from its midst� in one blast, because �a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counter-strike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world.� Evidently wiping Israel off the map seems to be one of those rare points of bipartisan consensus in Tehran, the Iranian equivalent of a prescription drug plan for seniors: we�re just arguing over the details.
So the question is: Will they do it?
And the minute you have to ask, you know the answer. If, say, Norway or Ireland acquired nuclear weapons, we might regret the �proliferation,� but we wouldn�t have to contemplate mushroom clouds over neighboring states. In that sense, the civilized world has already lost: to enter into negotiations with a jurisdiction headed by a Holocaust-denying millenarian nut job is, in itself, an act of profound weakness�the first concession, regardless of what weaselly settlement might eventually emerge.
Conversely, a key reason to stop Iran is to demonstrate that we can still muster the will to do so. Instead, the striking characteristic of the long diplomatic dance that brought us to this moment is how September 10th it�s all been. The free world�s delegated negotiators (the European Union) and transnational institutions (the IAEA) have continually given the impression that they�d be content just to boot it down the road to next year or the year after or find some arrangement�this decade�s Oil-for-Food or North Korean deal�that would get them off the hook. If you talk to EU foreign ministers, they�ve already psychologically accepted a nuclear Iran. Indeed, the chief characteristic of the West�s reaction to Iran�s nuclearization has been an enervated fatalism.
Back when nuclear weapons were an elite club of five relatively sane world powers, your average Western progressive was convinced the planet was about to go ka-boom any minute. The mushroom cloud was one of the most familiar images in the culture, a recurring feature of novels and album covers and movie posters. There were bestselling dystopian picture books for children, in which the handful of survivors spent their last days walking in a nuclear winter wonderland. Now a state openly committed to the annihilation of a neighboring nation has nukes, and we shrug: Can�t be helped. Just the way things are. One hears sophisticated arguments that perhaps the best thing is to let everyone get �em, and then no one will use them. And if Iran�s head of state happens to threaten to wipe Israel off the map, we should understand that this is a rhetorical stylistic device that�s part of the Persian oral narrative tradition, and it would be a grossly Eurocentric misinterpretation to take it literally.
The fatalists have a point. We may well be headed for a world in which anybody with a few thousand bucks and the right unlisted Asian phone numbers in his Rolodex can get a nuke. But, even so, there are compelling reasons for preventing Iran in particular from going nuclear. Back in his student days at the U.S. embassy, young Mr. Ahmadinejad seized American sovereign territory, and the Americans did nothing. And I would wager that�s still how he looks at the world. And, like Rafsanjani, he would regard, say, Muslim deaths in an obliterated Jerusalem as worthy collateral damage in promoting the greater good of a Jew-free Middle East. The Palestinians and their �right of return� have never been more than a weapon of convenience with which to chastise the West. To assume Tehran would never nuke Israel because a shift in wind direction would contaminate Ramallah is to be as ignorant of history as most Palestinians are: from Yasser Arafat�s uncle, the pro-Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, to the insurgents in Iraq today, Islamists have never been shy about slaughtering Muslims in pursuit of their strategic goals.
But it doesn�t have to come to that. Go back to that Argentine bombing. It was, in fact, the second major Iranian-sponsored attack in Buenos Aires. The year before, 1993, a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed 29 people and injured hundreds more in an attack on the Israeli Embassy. In the case of the community center bombing, the killer had flown from Lebanon a few days earlier and entered Latin America through the porous tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Suppose Iran had had a �dirty nuke� shipped to Hezbollah, or even the full-blown thing: Would it have been any less easy to get it into the country? And, if a significant chunk of downtown Buenos Aires were rendered uninhabitable, what would the Argentine government do? Iran can project itself to South America effortlessly, but Argentina can�t project itself to the Middle East at all. It can�t nuke Tehran, and it can�t attack Iran in conventional ways.
So any retaliation would be down to others. Would Washington act? It depends how clear the fingerprints were. If the links back to the mullahs were just a teensy-weensy bit tenuous and murky, how eager would the U.S. be to reciprocate? Bush and Rumsfeld might�but an administration of a more Clinto-Powellite bent? How much pressure would there be for investigations under UN auspices? Perhaps Hans Blix could come out of retirement, and we could have a six-month dance through Security-Council coalition-building, with the secretary of state making a last-minute flight to Khartoum to try to persuade Sudan to switch its vote.
Perhaps it�s unduly pessimistic to write the civilized world automatically into what Osama bin Laden called the �weak horse� role (Islam being the �strong horse�). But, if you were an Iranian �moderate� and you�d watched the West�s reaction to the embassy seizure and the Rushdie murders and Hezbollah terrorism, wouldn�t you be thinking along those lines? I don�t suppose Buenos Aires Jews expect to have their institutions nuked any more than 12 years ago they expected to be blown up in their own city by Iranian-backed suicide bombers. Nukes have gone freelance, and there�s nothing much we can do about that, and sooner or later we�ll see the consequences�in Vancouver or Rotterdam, Glasgow or Atlanta. But, that being so, we owe it to ourselves to take the minimal precautionary step of ending the one regime whose political establishment is explicitly pledged to the nuclear annihilation of neighboring states.
Once again, we face a choice between bad and worse options. There can be no �surgical� strike in any meaningful sense: Iran�s clients on the ground will retaliate in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and Europe. Nor should we put much stock in the country�s allegedly �pro-American� youth. This shouldn�t be a touchy-feely nation-building exercise: rehabilitation may be a bonus, but the primary objective should be punishment�and incarceration. It�s up to the Iranian people how nutty a government they want to live with, but extraterritorial nuttiness has to be shown not to pay. That means swift, massive, devastating force that decapitates the regime�but no occupation.
The cost of de-nuking Iran will be high now but significantly higher with every year it�s postponed. The lesson of the Danish cartoons is the clearest reminder that what is at stake here is the credibility of our civilization. Whether or not we end the nuclearization of the Islamic Republic will be an act that defines our time.
|
http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_2_iran.html
I'm anti-war, but he is right. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
stevemcgarrett
Joined: 24 Mar 2006
|
| Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 2:34 am Post subject: |
|
|
Sorry BJWD, but I don't think EFLTrainer's reading attention span is that long.
EFLTrainer:
First off, the Iraqi authorities have confirmed that the British were operating on their behalf against smugglers and have been for years. But of course you'll probably say that the current Iraqi government is beholden to the Brits.
Fine, then how do you explain the fact that the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman changed the coordinates for the location of the British vessels? Or was that just an oversight on their part, sand blowing in their eyes and such?
Regardless, as BJWD pointed out, the Iranians are in clear violation of international law concerning their captives which strains their credibility to say the least. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
stevemcgarrett
Joined: 24 Mar 2006
|
| Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 3:17 am Post subject: |
|
|
It would appear that the Iranian leadership is now deliberately engaging in brinkmanship. This just in from the BBC News wire (excerpted):
| Quote: |
Iran crisis reflects growing isolation
By Sadeq Saba
BBC World Service Iran analyst
Earlier this month the UN Security Council passed a resolution against Iran over its nuclear programme. Iranian diplomats worked very hard to convince some members of the council, such as South Africa, Indonesia and Qatar, to support Tehran's case. But it failed, and the vote in favour of the resolution was unanimous, further convincing the Iranian leadership that they have few friends left at the UN and that diplomacy is not working in their favour....
Act of desperation?
It was in this setting that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently made a significant statement. He said that so far Iran had acted legally to defend what it saw as its right to pursue a nuclear programme. He went on to say that because the international community had responded with "illegal acts" - by which he meant the Security Council resolutions - Iran itself would from now on feel justified in acting illegally.
Ayatollah Khamenei emphasised that Iran would use any means available to it to defend itself. It is not clear whether the capture of the British sailors and marines was premeditated or not, but the ayatollah's comments could have given a green light to Revolutionary Guards to seize them. If it was premeditated, the capture could be interpreted as an act of desperation by a government which feels isolated and threatened.... |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
EFLtrainer
Joined: 04 May 2005
|
| Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 5:01 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Gopher wrote: |
| EFLtrainer wrote: |
| What law states that a military vessel violating a nation's sovereignty cannot be boarded? |
BLT, were Tehran and London at war or at peace when the Iranians boarded and seized this vessel and its crew...? (And this is a rhetorical question.)
Maritime Law 101. Rules, standards, and international norms differ in war and peace. What legal basis can the Iranian government cite that might tend to legitimate its seizing British sailors, marines from a British-flagged vessel operating openly, and during peacetime, in the Gulf...?
What is next? Going to claim the British defected, are you...? |
You did not answer the question: what law states it is illegal for Iran to take into custody those that cross its borders? The US does this all the time with illegal immigration. How does it differ when over water?
Also, there has been no declaration of war by Britain, so that is irrelevant.
Anyway, asking for info, not making a statement. You've already tried to play that game and misrepresented what I have posted on this thread. Now, if you've no answer, please do not respond.
Stop living down to your own quote below. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
EFLtrainer
Joined: 04 May 2005
|
| Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 5:07 am Post subject: |
|
|
| BJWD wrote: |
| EFL, do you know what the Geneva conventions are? Do you know the procedure involved here? If not, don't speak. |
You have closed your mind, bj. Open it. Read my posts. I have stated no opinion. I very clearly stated my question was NOT rhetorical. I don't know the law in this area, but common sense says any nation may take into custody those violatin its borders, whether on land or sea. What is the material difference between illegal immigrants crossing the US border being seized and this situation? (I do not mean the context. That is obvious. But an incursion is an incursion, no?)
It was a sincere question: under what international agreement is it illegal for Iran to take into custody anyone who invades their borders? (Stop seeing what you want to see. It's a fool's errand.)
Finally, your post above did not appear to address the question raised, but I'm not spending the time to wade through it. If you'd care to isolate the sections that are relevant... |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
EFLtrainer
Joined: 04 May 2005
|
| Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 5:14 am Post subject: |
|
|
| stevemcgarrett wrote: |
Sorry BJWD, but I don't think EFLTrainer's reading attention span is that long.
EFLTrainer:
First off, the Iraqi authorities have confirmed that the British were operating on their behalf against smugglers and have been for years. But of course you'll probably say that the current Iraqi government is beholden to the Brits.
Fine, then how do you explain the fact that the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman changed the coordinates for the location of the British vessels? Or was that just an oversight on their part, sand blowing in their eyes and such?
Regardless, as BJWD pointed out, the Iranians are in clear violation of international law concerning their captives which strains their credibility to say the least. |
You, like the others, have all reacted as if I have stated a position. I have not. My question - reading comprehension, eh? - was NOT rhetorical. I am not addressing the WHYs. I m not addressing the wherefores. I am addressing one simple issue: several on this thread have stated that Iran is acting illegally. My question is this: IF the Brits *were* in either Iran's waters or in disputed waters, how can their detention be deemed illegal?
Think you can handle that? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
jinju
Joined: 22 Jan 2006
|
| Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 5:15 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Its time to eliminate Iran from all but history. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
|
| Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 8:43 am Post subject: |
|
|
| EFLtrainer wrote: |
| The US does this all the time... |
No. America does not do this ever. Immigration authorities deport illegals, BLT.
| EFLtrainer wrote: |
| Also, there has been no declaration of war by Britain, so that is irrelevant. |
Huh? Actually, there has been no declaration of war by Iran, so that makes this seizure an illegal maritime act.
Everyone has answered your question, and from multiple points of view. You are stubbornly not listening, living up to your reputation here. And why, pray tell, are you defending Tehran's position...? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
EFLtrainer
Joined: 04 May 2005
|
| Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 9:00 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Gopher wrote: |
| No. America does not do this ever. Immigration authorities deport illegals, BLT. |
And they aren't arrested first? You're joking, right?
| Gopher wrote: |
| EFLtrainer wrote: |
| Also, there has been no declaration of war by Britain, so that is irrelevant. |
Huh? Actually, there has been no declaration of war by Iran, so that makes this seizure an illegal maritime act.
Everyone has answered your question, and from multiple points of view. You are stubbornly not listening, living up to your reputation here. And why, pray tell, are you defending Tehran's position...? |
I am listening. And you, as always, show yourself to be liar. I asked to see the law. Nobody has shown me ANY law. You say it is maritime law they cannot be held. Link, please. I don't care either way. I am seeking info.
I am defending Iran? Go back to the beginning of the thread. There is nothing in this thread to show I support Iran. Nothing. But you know that. Stupid, lying scum.
If you don't have an answer, don't respond. Irrelevant idiot.
Last edited by EFLtrainer on Sat Mar 31, 2007 9:35 am; edited 1 time in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
EFLtrainer
Joined: 04 May 2005
|
| Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 9:34 am Post subject: |
|
|
Here is an answer. According to the below, if the Iranians can show that the Brits were in their waters, or disputed waters, then the Brits were liable to detainment. If the Brits were indisputably in Iraqi waters, then they were not liable to detainment.
The sticking point is what they were doing at the time of detainment. According to the below, since they were engaged in a military action they can be detained. Had they simply wandered over the line, they would only be subject to being made to leave. If they refused or failed to react, they would then be subject to detainment.
So, as I said, it all comes down to those coordinates. It doesn't help the Brits to be in disputed waters, it seems. They had to have been in definite Iraqi waters.
As I stated many pages back: was the Iranian action stupid? Yes. Was it illegal? yet to be determined.
Anyone got better sources than these?
Goopher is an idiot.
| Quote: |
I have just read the UNITED NATIONS CONVENTION ON THE LAW OF THE SEA (http://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/closindx.htm), or at least the parts that seem applicable in this instance.
Assuming that the sailors were in Iranian territorial waters, which appears to be the less likely, though possible, scenario, they would forfeit their right of innocent passage because they were carrying out operations with weapons and affecting the sovereignty of Iran (Art 19.2 a and b). However, the convention only gives the aggreived state the right to request that the offending party leave immediately:
Art 30: "If any warship does not comply with the laws and regulations of the coastal State concerning passage through the territorial sea and disregards any request for compliance therewith which is made to it, the coastal State may require it to leave the territorial sea immediately."
I assume that the RIBs are classed as warships as they carry the white ensign and are crewed by regular servicemen, but I may be wrong. There was mention in the convention that the vessel needs to have a duly-commissioned officer. I haven't heard of any officer reported in the press, but I would be very surprised if the boarding party were led by a junior rate. Not sure if a senior rate / NCO would suffice.
The convention doesn't appear to say what powers the coastal state have in terms of arrests etc should the request to leave be ignored. However, it doesn't look like any such request was made either to the RIB crew or to HMS Cornwall, unless Iran claims that this incident is a continuance of the 2004 incident, which would be stretching it a little I think.
Does anyone have any legal justification for the arrest itself? (other than on charges of espionage which would be ridiculous).
Posted by: swheelz [TypeKey Profile Page] at March 31, 2007 10:51 AM
It is complicated by the fact that they were not just whizzing around in boats (if that was all then Iran would just have to ask them to leave, as you say) but had conducted an armed boarding of a neutral vessel.
If they had boarded a vessel in Iranian territorial waters, Iran would have the right to arrest them. Say this boarding by the British of a neutral vessel had happened close to the Iranian coast twenty miles to the East, nobody would doubt that.
But of course these are disputed waters. Just as we are wrong unequivocally to say they are Iraqi waters, Iran cannot say unequivocally they are Iranian waters either.
Given the waters are disputed, Iran's behaviour is bellicose and an overreaction. But then, so is ours.
Posted by: Craig [TypeKey Profile Page] at March 31, 2007 1:14 PM
That is why, incidentally, the MOD are quite right to put the emphasis on where the boarded vessel was, not the route of the boats. Military personnel just being in military boats in foreign territorial seas would not be an arrestable offence, just a warning off; a boarding would.
Posted by: Craig [TypeKey Profile Page] at March 31, 2007 2:24 PM |
Last edited by EFLtrainer on Sat Mar 31, 2007 10:23 am; edited 1 time in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
|
| Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 10:07 am Post subject: |
|
|
Truly moronic, dense, and on a mission to discredit America and now Britian -- therefore, lacking in all credibility yourself.
The British were not engaged in an act of war against Iran. Hard to believe that fifteen sailors and marines in a boarding party constitute "an invasion." But that is exactly what you appear to be championing.
Moreover, neither Britain nor Iran had declared war against the other. That makes this a peacetime seizure of another state's vessel and illegal. If these servicemen and women were indeed in Iranian waters (and I do not believe they were), Tehran's proper course of action would have been to escort them out. Again, peacetime and not wartime rules apply. (Unless we ought to assume that a de facto state of war exists, which appears to be the case, especially given Tehran's talk of "trying" these sailors and marines for imperialism.)
Furthermore, the British claim they operated in Iraqi waters. Iran claims otherwise, but has changed its story re: where exactly the British were at least twice. Rather than acknowledging, at the very least, that Tehran simply is out of its depth and does not know what it is talking about, you choose to believe that Britain is the aggressor and is lying.
On top of all of this, most of us see a pattern of Iranian brinksmanship here (from the Israeli-Hezbollah War to this seizure). You, however, still see them as victims of imperialism -- which is, again, defending their perspective.
Bitter, angry, conflicted, little man. Unable to see clearly. I pity you the more. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
freshking
Joined: 07 Dec 2006
|
| Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 10:49 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Nice avatar Gopher. Is that Richard Marcinko? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
