The British navy is obviously under rules of engagement that prevented the captain of the destroyer from firing on the Iranians. The USS Cole was under similar rules of engagement which allowed a small boat to come right up to its hull.

Rules of engagement are set by the military in order to enforce POLITICAL instructions. When the British navy was the fearsome force to be reckoned with that it was up until the labor party dismatled it, British fleet officers often ignored the instructions from politicians, in one well known case in WWII a British fleet officer ignored a direct order to withdraw his ships, which were evacuating British soldiers from Crete, and leave the soldiers (many of whom were wounded) on the shore, due to German planes which were bombing and strafing his ships. The fleet officer replied to this order “Sir, it takes 3 years to build a ship, it takes 300 years to build a tradition, I will not abandon these British soldiers to the Germans, we will not leave until every single one of them has been evacuated, come what may”. Unfortunately for the British people, their peace loving labor party threw away 300 years of tradition that was built with the blood and courage of people like this admiral, when they dismantled the British navy, the British people are now paying a very heavy price.

The question is almost worth as much as the answer. The fact that Iran has to ask that question and doesn’t know the answer forces them to try to act to counter the effects of multiple different answers, sometimes to cross purposes I’ll bet.

sdemetri:
If Sunni militias are fighting Shiite militias, as news accounts report daily, the logic of Iran funding both sides is faulty, if not ridiculous.

Is the phrase “playing both ends against the middle” unfamiliar to you? Iran doesn’t need to have any one side win; they need to have enough civil strife that everyone loses and the country splits apart. Then they get to come in and cherry-pick the pieces.

nate zuckerman:

Iran grabs Brits; US (there is no multinational force) grabs Iranians…what does this tell us?

That you apparently think that British subjects are American citizens. Newsflash; in English, “multi-” means “more than one”.

Scotty:

Why did the gutless wonder commanding the nasty-looking destroyer the Brit. sailors came from not interdict the Iranian gunboats and nip the problem in the bud?

I am tempted to join the chorus agreeing with you, but a) we don’t know the British commander’s ROE, and b) we don’t know what the odds were that blowing the hell out of the Iranians would have gotten the 15 British sailors killed in the bargain and what calculation the British equivalent of the JAG requires of the commander in such a situation. This law is being fought by military lawyers a lot more than previous ones.

That may be the wrong explanation, but surely something other than chickensh** cowardice explains the captain’s failure to respond.

Why? The idea is to sow strife and conflict inside Iraq, and it’s working. Iran is playing both sides against each other, what is so hard to believe about that?

The rest of your post doesn’t make sense either, I won’t bother with it.

Perhaps 300 is “a record number of prisoners” (my italics) and the reason “Virtually all were captured in the past two months” is because the other, previously-captured Iran-linked operatives were released – so there was no accumulation.

That would be of a piece with the mass releases of many thousands of insurgents and terrorists inside Iraq and hundreds more from Gitmo. Those people returned to fight against and kill our troops, yet the Bush administration continued the practice as part of its self-defeating War Lite.

Here’s a bit of what F. J. Bing West, former assistant secretary of defense, and currently a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, recently said on the topic (PDF file):

Iraq is holding fewer prisoners than Saddam released in late 2002, when he opened the jail gates and let loose tens of thousands of criminals that society had incarcerated over the decades. today, eight out of ten detainees walk free-and they are paid $6 a day for their inconvenience.

…The reason we are not affecting the enemy is because we let him go. “catch and release program” is frustrating to American and Iraqi Soldiers in Iraq; the farcical “rule of law” aids and abets the insurgents and death squads. This war is going to drag on unnecessarily because our senior commanders, military and civilian, do not understand that the war effort is being systematically undercut by not arresting and imprisoning insurgents and death squad members for the duration of the conflict.

The greatest single defect-and it may be mortal-in the effort to restore stability is the refusal of the Iraqi and American systems to imprison the criminals, insurgents, and death squad members.

…So how do we prevail? We don’t.

This has been going on for years, and reflects the White House policy of making political negatives disappear through sleight-of-hand, outreach and “negotiations,” of the sort that blessed us with Iran/al Sadr’s empire encompassing all of southern Iraq.

And they don’t want their country to be the playground of the hostile Iranian regime.

And they want the Coalition forces to remain to buy them the time to stand on their own.

That means standing against the Iranian sponsored paramilitaries. It means asserting their soveriengty over their shared border with Iran.

It means taking into custody, as per Iraqi law, militants based on a reasonable suspicion of involvement in insurgent attacks.

Three hundred. That tells us more than enough about the Iranian regime and about the paramilitaries they sponsor with both blood and treasure. They are fueling the illegitimate fight against the freedom and newly asserted democracy of the Iraqi People.

Three hundred more in the next coupel of months would be very helpful in defending the unity of Iraq and in defending the beachhead for true reform and freedom in that part of the world. Iran’s regime won’t tolerate such reforms within its own borders and is proven to be hostile toward such reforms within the territories of its neighbors — and others in the region.

This new effort of the Coaliton, under the impetus of a new and unflinching American Commander, is very welcomed by the Iraqis and by those of us who see this as a just struggle against evil.