Iran captures 15 British Royal Marines

I haven't been following this story that closely, but the bit that has always bothered me the most (even more than where *did* this thing actually take place?) is how come a 5000 ton warship did nothing to prevent the capture in the first place?'.

Here's an article that discusses exactly that, and let me warn you, friends, it does not make good reading for supporters of the once-great Royal Navy, nor for our politicians.

-----------------------

Focus: In the eye of the storm
Fifteen sailors snatched and publicly humiliated without a single shot fired. Tony Allen-Mills, Michael Smith and Marie Colvin on a shambles Britain could have avoided
Sunday Times
April 1, 2007

They should have known the Iranians might spring a trap. Several months before the current hostage crisis a small group of American and Iraqi soldiers had been patrolling near the Iranian border 75 miles east of Baghdad.

They spotted a single Iranian soldier lurking in Iraqi territory near the town of Balad Ruz and moved forward to question him. The Americans were, according to a US army report obtained by The Sunday Times, promptly ambushed by a much larger platoon of Iranian soldiers who had been hiding across the nearby border.

An Iranian captain warned the Americans that “if they tried to leave their location, the Iranians would fire upon them”. For a few moments the US paratroopers must have felt as helpless as the British sailors in inflatable speedboats who were surprised 10 days ago by more heavily armed Iranian vessels.

The US incident last September ended very differently. Firing broke out. Both sides scattered and a potential hostage crisis was averted as the Americans escaped unhurt.

By contrast, the 14 British service-men and one woman proved humiliatingly vulnerable to a low-tech Iranian naval manoeuvre that has provoked mocking headlines around the world. Yesterday they were still at the mercy of their unpredictable Iranian captors, reduced to making forced false apologies for breaching Iranian territory.

Nathan Thomas Summers, one of the captured crewmen, was paraded on television. “We trespassed without permission,” he said. “I deeply apologise for entering your waters.”

Yesterday Hussein Shari’atma-dari, a senior adviser to the regime, described the incident as a “plot from London to put more pressures on Iran”. He said: “The path taken by Britain and the West shows that they do not want to take any step for the release of the British soldiers, therefore Iran must put them on trial.”

How could the British forces have been caught so unawares? They should have been alerted months ago by the Balad Ruz clash to the heightened threat of an Iranian assault. They might even have read subsequent warnings – reported in The Sunday Times as recently as two weeks ago – that Tehran was threatening to kidnap “a nice bunch of blue-eyed blond-haired officers”.

As Iranian radicals rejoiced at their propaganda triumph last week, even some of Britain’s friends were scathing in their condemnation of military impotence and political incompetence.

“Wimping out on Iran” was one of the more polite commentaries in the New York Daily News. John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, dubbed the British government’s performance as “pathetic”.

The crisis has reduced Tony Blair and several of his officials to the status of irrelevant foghorns, issuing empty warnings about “stepping up the pressure” and “moving to the next phase”.

Such is the shambles that senior Royal Navy officers at the fleet’s operational headquarters have been directed to review the rules of engagement for naval boarding parties. If necessary they will recommend changes to ensure Britain’s forces are never again seized so easily without a shot being fired.

THE streets of Tehran were largely empty last week as Iranians celebrated Norouz, their new year festival. There was a chill in the air and snow on the distant mountains as Mullah Ahmad Khatami mounted his podium in the courtyard of Tehran University to lead Friday prayers.

Khatami, viewed as a rising hard-liner, quickly turned to the hostage crisis. “Britain must know that this is not the 19th century and it should not be taking an imperial posture,” the burly mullah said.

“Everyone knows that Britain is a defeated nation that acts as a political broker [for the Americans],” he went on. “You cannot frighten Iran by sending gunboats and doing whatever pleases you. Iran today is a strong Iran and is the only country that stands up to the Americans.”

Iran has been resisting a campaign led by the United States and Britain at the UN to force the mullahs to end Iran’s programme of enriching uranium. Iran claims it will be used to produce civilian nuclear power but the West fears Iran wants to produce a nuclear bomb.

Khatami said his religious colleagues sent their “warmest congratulations” to the “mighty border guards” who had seized the British sailors. He condemned London for “bullish declarations and devious actions” and warned: “Britain should understand that if they want to continue that path of bullying, they would pay a huge price.”

This was scarcely the response that Blair can have been hoping for when he warned last Tuesday that Britain’s campaign to free the captives would “move into a different phase” if Iran did not respond.

Blair added: “I hope we manage to get them to realise that they have to release them.”

While there was no doubting the outrage shared by British ministers, it was equally clear by Thursday’s cabinet meeting that Britain’s big mistake was to have allowed the sailors to be captured in the first place.

“It’s not as simple as just being tough with the Iranians,” Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, argued to her colleagues.

“They have tentacles in all sorts of areas such as the Afghan warlords, the Iraqi insurgents and Hamas.”

In other words, Beckett was suggesting, any military action against Tehran was likely to be met by a barrage of terrorist reprisals by Iranian allies around the globe. “We have to be more sophisticated,” she insisted.

At 10 Downing Street, senior officials took a similar line. “There is no real point in sabre-rattling for its own sake,” said one official. “We have been looking for the opportunity to engage through our multilateral contacts.”

Variations on that peacemongering theme were expressed widely in Whitehall last week. John Williams, a former Foreign Office director of communications who was intimately involved in protracted negotiations over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, said he believed Beckett’s hands were tied. “The Foreign Office objective is to get our people out safely. There is just too much at stake for any other approach,” he said.

Such diplomatic hand-wringing was last week driving American hawks to distraction. “The Brits have laboured mightily for many years to prevent the United States from pursuing vigorous action against Iran,” sneered Michael Ledeen, a prominent neocon and Middle East scholar who has long argued for regime change in Tehran. “Now they will have to answer to the families of the hostages.” Ledeen argued that coalition forces should “undertake the legitimate self-defence to which we are entitled”, and attack terrorist training camps and bomb factories inside Iran.

Newt Gingrich, the former Republican congressman who is considering a presidential bid, urged Britain to use military force to destroy Iran’s petrol production company. If a lack of petrol for their cars forced Iranians to “go back to walking and using oxen to pull carts”, the people might rise against the ayatollahs, Gingrich said.

None of which will come as much comfort to the frightened family of Leading Seaman Faye Turney, 26, who has become the human face of the crisis. Psychologists have had a field day analysing the pitiful videos of Turney attempting to cooperate under obvious duress.

The three letters she has purportedly written to her parents. to a “representative of the House of Commons” and to “British People” were obviously dictated in large part by her Iranian captors. Yet however crude Iran’s propaganda may seem in Britain, it is mainly aimed elsewhere. Iran is patently showing off to its radical acolytes around the globe, revelling in the chance to kick sand in the face of the West.

The so-called confessions of Turney and Summers were first aired not in Farsi, which is spoken by most Iranians, but on an Arab-language television station watched widely in Iraq and Arab Gulf countries. The message was clear – the Arab world must look to Tehran if it wishes to vanquish the American invaders and see off their yapping British lapdogs.

How they must have laughed in Iran last week when Britain failed to persuade the UN even to “deplore” the seizure of its sailors. The UN security council expressed “grave concern” instead. “That’ll really show the Iranians we mean business,” commented one disillusioned British diplomat. WITH diplomatic efforts apparently stalling, attention is likely to return this week to how the Royal Navy, pride of Britain for at least 350 years, allowed this disaster to happen in the first place. Have we really sunk so low that we cannot fight off a few Iranian thugs in what amounted to little more than militarised speedboats?

Vice-Admiral Charles Style, a deputy chief of defence staff, made a good fist of defending the navy’s position at a Ministry of Defence press conference on Wednesday. He had all the right satellite coordinates and charts to show the Iranians were at fault, but everyone listening knew that it no longer really mattered exactly where our chaps had been arrested – they should not have been arrested at all.

That point was rammed home by an officer on board the US frigate that is the other main ship in Task Force 158, the British-commanded fleet patrolling off Iraq. Lieutenant-Commander Erik Horner of the USS Underwood said US sailors’ rules of engagement meant they not only had the right to defend themselves against that kind of aggression, but also were obliged to do so. “Our reaction was: why didn’t your guys defend themselves?” Horner said.

John Pike, one of America’s leading military analysts, was similarly baffled that the sailors’ home ship, HMS Cornwall, was up to 11 miles away, too far to offer immediate cover as the British inflatables searched an Indian freighter in a routine antismuggling check. Despite all the evidence that Iran was looking to capture “blue-eyed officers”, Pike said, “there seems to have been a loss of situational awareness on the part of the folks on Cornwall that their boarding party could be snuck up on like that”.

Admiral Sir Alan West, the former first sea lord, defended the lack of aggression on the British side, pointing out that UK rules of engagement “are very much deescalatory, because we don’t want wars starting”. He added: “The reason we are there is to be a force for good, to make the whole area safe. So we try to downplay things. Rather than roaring into action and sinking everything in sight we try to step back and that, of course, is why our chaps were . . . captured.”

The British lapse was all the more surprising because the same thing happened in June 2004, when eight sailors and marines were seized in the same area and released three days later. The defence ministry compiled a “lessons learnt” paper to ensure that those mistakes were not repeated.

The Sunday Times has learnt that the paper highlighted the need for “top cover” for boarding parties, which should always have been covered from the air by the presence of a helicopter. The Cornwall’s Lynx – armed with a .50 machinegun that could have caused serious damage to the Iranian fast boats – had apparently been overhead when the sailors boarded the Indian freighter.

Why did it turn back, leaving the sailors exposed? The ministry initially said last week that it needed to refuel before retreating behind an insistence that there was no standard procedure for keeping a helicopter in place.

It also remained a mystery how the Cornwall’s advanced radar and sonar systems failed to alert its crew to a problem. As a type22 frigate, the Cornwall has the capability to track ships up to 200 miles away. One recently retired naval officer said even basic navigation radar should have picked up motorboats at shorter range, assuming someone was looking out for them.

An official board of inquiry will ultimately be charged with examining the incident and establishing, among many other things, why no immediate effort was made to intercept the Iranians as they departed with their captives.

Less easy to predict is how the standoff will be resolved. “A military confrontation would just be losing all round. Both sides realise that,” said Robert Lowe of the Chatham House think tank. He said the solution had to be one where “neither side loses face”.

One experienced source who has dealt with Iran in the past expects the hostages to be released after a week to 10 days, but he said that was likely only if Britain relaxed its pressure. “They will not want to be seen to be reacting to anything we are saying or doing,” he said.

A rescue attempt, if successful, would be hugely popular in Britain and might restore Blair’s tattered image in America. “There are plans being made [for a possible rescue],” one senior British source acknowledged. But it is not even clear where the sailors are being held.

Nor is history on the prime minister’s side. A US attempt to rescue embassy hostages in Iran in 1980 ended in a fiasco of colliding aircraft in the desert. Those hostages were held for 444 days.