Blair uses sailors as bait

Bush needed some pre-summer tension-building from an outside partner - and Blair delivered perfectly - he gave a dozen or so of his troops to Iran:

Iranian state television aired new video Sunday showing two of the 15 captured British sailors pointing to a spot on a map of the Persian Gulf where they were seized and acknowledging it was in Iranian territorial waters.

Britain's Foreign Office immediately denounced the video, saying it was "completely unacceptable for these pictures to be shown on TV."

Bushco will stay cool for the summer, then the propaganda blitz will crank up again in late August, just like how they delivered the Iraq War.

What I'm more curious about, though, is what commander sacrificed his own men 'for the greater good'? Those orders had to come down from on high. Maybe they were typed or written somewhere, but probably not - at least, not explicitly. Still, someone knowingly put those men in a compromised position. Who is the British commanding officer responsible for sending those men into captivity? We deserve a name.

...would like to add that use of the term 'hostage' in referring to those held by Iran is completely illegitimate, unless we also refer to the thousands held by the U.S. in Iraq as hostages. And the folks we got locked up in that other torture haven, Gitmo. And the thousands of Palestinians that Israel has locked up in its torture chambers.

Not to mention - and this is a big one - the U.S. kidnapped an Iranian diplomat. That person is an official member of the Iranian government, and the U.S. kinapped him and had held him hostage for two months already, by the time this new hostage crisis occurred. On the scale of seriousness of breach of international law, if kidnapping an unarmed civilian is a '1', then kidnapping a diplomat is a '10'.

Bush decided to let the diplomat go - Blair had done his duty - we don't need to kick this thing off for another few months. In fact, if it happened too soon, the American public wouldn't buy it. We need a few more months of CNN/Fox/MSNBC/CBS/NBC/NYTimes/USAToday/WaPo/WSJ propaganda to prepare our minds for the next invasion.

...fixed typo.