Nth verse, same as the first!

In the spirit of the Tonkin Gulf incident and the Gleiwitz raid, the seizure of 15 British Naval and Marine personnel and their subsequent transit in custody to Tehran is giving all the alarmists and war doggies plenty of reason to howl, rattle sabers and beat war drums. Coupled with the new sanctions recently imposed on Iran by the UN security council the Iranian government is being backed into a corner more and more tight each day.

The key fact that is being hotly contested right now is where the British patrol boats (2 rubber boat with outboard motors) actually were when they were seized. Predictably, the "we said, they said" debate began hours after the sailors and marines were surrounded and detained by the Iranian forces. It has only gotten louder over the course of two days, with the majority of the western mainstream media printing the governments version of these events as the unshakeable truth. Glenn Greenwald has written a lengthy column on it today at Salon. The updates are especially telling, III in particular:

UPDATE III: At the new National Review blog called "The Tank" (that's really tough - they must mean business over there), J. Peter Pham asks: "did Iran just declare war on the Coalition?" Meanwhile, in a NR feature article, Mario Loyola suggests that Iran may very well be telling the truth about what happened here, and that this incident was the by-product of efforts by the U.S. and Britian to provoke Iran into war -- justifiably, in Loyola's view (needless to say):

It wouldn't surprise me if the Iranians were actually responding, in this case, to a carefully planned provocation of our own. As Churchill said, sometimes the truth is so precious that she must be attended by a bodyguard of lies. . . .

The gloves are coming off. And the risk-calculation here is: If someone gets nervous and starts shooting, the timing would be more auspicious now for us than for the Iranians. Therefore, it only makes sense that American and British naval units operating in the Gulf would be in a more forward-leaning and aggressive posture than the Iranians.

It wouldn't surprise me if the British sailors were detained because the British did something to make the Iranians really angry. Khamanei dramatically upped the ante this week. We probably raised. And they probably raised back. The stakes in this nuclear-poker game just got a little higher.

So the U.S. and Britain are deliberately provoking Iran in a "nuclear-poker game" and then lying about what they are up to, and Loyola thinks that's all great. A whole new war -- it's all so exciting and pulsating.

As C3PO liked to put it on numerous occasions in several of the SW films: "I have a bad feeling about this..." Of course, the irony of this statement by an android with no naturally occurring emotions (only those written into the programming) could be the subject of a lengthy essay on the reflection of the state of mankind's relationship with the his creations based on one of said creations uttering such a sentiment.

I wrote here that the Iranians are in quite a tight spot with hostile and/or Nuclear powers surrounding them on all sides.

Iran is not an immediate threat to the United States or its allies in the region. IF Iran is pursuing nuclear enrichment technology for the purpose of developing a weapons program in addition to an energy program, it is not an offensive act. It is an act of defense motivated by the fact that Iran is now surrounded by declared and undeclared nuclear powers: Russia to the North, Pakistan, India and China to the East, Israel to the West, and the United States to the South in the Persian Gulf with an disproportionately sized naval armada.

Whether or not they recognize the tactics of the British and American forces and, to a certain extent, the UN Security Council (in many ways just another wing of US influence) as provocative, restraint has to be getting harder and harder to adhere to. Their patience and/or feelings of security may have reached their limit what with this latest incident on top of the sanctions imposed by the Security council this week which the Iranians have rejected, of course.

More and more these days that great song by REM keeps going through my head...

UPDATE 26 MAR 07: Justin Raimondo writes here that the seizure of the sailors smacks in a painfully obvious way of the same maneuvering that I referenced in the beginning of this post and that the wheels are starting to spin faster on the war machine being steered in the direction of Iran.