Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Neocon favorite, Robert Tait, reports from Tehran again, and the editors choose a headline very likely to please militarists in Washington and London. “Kidnappings came day before UN resolution“, it reads. So now, the armed British marines and sailors on Iran’s international borders are “kidnapped”! Such an innocent word. Almost makes it appear as if Iranian revolutionary guards visited them at home, tied their parents to their chairs, threw them over their shoulders and vanished into the night before they could get dressed.

Now where have we heard that language before?

Remember that armed Israeli soldiers who was ‘kidnapped’ while his comrades were wasting whole Palestinian families in Gaza? Remember the other two who were ‘kindapped’ while they were on an armed patrol on or inside the borders of another sovereign country – Lebanon?

Tait is a shrewd journalist however. He does make a distinciton between kidnapping and “kidnapping”. The latter he applies to situations when diplomats are snatched by armed men, as in the case of the Iranian diplomats. He writes:

The arrests could have been motivated by other factors, including a desire to strike back at what Iran sees as “kidnappings” of its diplomats and operatives by US forces in Iraq.

But irony is clearly not a notion the paper is too familiar with. While the Tait starts by declaring that defining “demarcation lines in the Shatt al-Arab waterway has proved a historical challenge for cartographers, so it is not unlikely that it may have been beyond the 15 British sailors patrolling the internationally sensitive route last Friday,” however, he goes on to make his assertions, as if he were certain of the sailors position: ” The Britons were captured a day before the UN security council met to approve a resolution imposing fresh sanctions over Iran’s continued refusal to suspend its uranium enrichment activities…The timing seemed more than mere coincidence“.

He is talking about the timing of the capture, of course, not the incursion, which, according to Tait “came as a welcome gift not only to the Revolutionary Guard crew that intercepted them but to the more hardline elements of Iran’s political leadership.”

Elsewhere in the Guardian, the Saudi propaganda organ Al-Sharq al-Awsat is quoted as saying, that according to “an unnamed military source”, who is apparently ”close to”[Guardian's quotes] the al-Quds brigade of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards “the seizure of the two-boat British patrol had been planned at a high level days in advance.” Guardian left out the rest of the sentence which read “…and pigs fly!”

No wonder Michael Ledeen likes these guys.