Asking for it
Among the responses to the Iranian hostage crisis, this one: it serves the Brits right. In the LA Times, Niall Ferguson puts it all down to Tony Blair’s weakness over slavery (h/t Kevin Drum):
Let that be a lesson. Even before Britain’s politicians had finished saying sorry last Sunday for depriving millions of their liberty, the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, 15 Britons found themselves deprived of their liberty by the Iranian government. When will Tony Blair ever learn that, in international relations, nice guys finish last?
In the New English Review, another British ex-pat, John Derbyshire thinks the cowardly sailors are to blame.
I certainly think that those British captives who have let themselves be put forward on Iranian TV, that woman wearing a headscarf, and the young man apologizing to the Iranian gangster-rulers, should be court-martialed for dereliction of duty when they get back to Blighty, with shooting definitely an option.
This stuff plays well with the American right – who are busy building British weakness into their ‘how-we-woz-betrayed-in-Iraq’ narrative. Mario Loyola:
The most tragic aspect of this whole drama is the window it has opened into the tortured psyche of our British allies. True enough, Britain is given to bouts of world-weary fatalism—a similar once hit Britain after World War II, and swept Churchill out of office. Still, I could never have guessed the extent to which Britain has accepted the loss of its national power. Our greatest ally, this people who have done so much to spread modernity, to protect and advance human civilization, to better the human condition, seem to have come under the spell of some mixture and pessimism and self-hatred.