Is another Zionist-NeoCon war on the horizon?
by James Buchanan
The mainstream media is trying to portray Bush as tough and decisive (as opposed to his usual deranged and tyrannical) in the midst of the British Sailor incident. The neocons have been praying to their subterranean god for an incident so that they can wage a brand new war on Iran. I wonder how many people know that the Iranians have said they would release the British sailors if the British simply admitted that they were trespassing into Iranian territory. Not an unreasonable request especially considering that all the believable evidence shows the British were in Iranian territory.
The closest thing to a neutral observer in this episode would be Iraqi fishermen, who witnessed the incident. One http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=10724 reports “The Iraqi military commander of the country’s territorial waters cast doubt on claims the Britons were in Iraqi waters. ‘We were informed by Iraqi fishermen after they had returned from sea that there were British gunboats in an area that is out of Iraqi control. We don’t know why they were there.’ ”
The truth has never been important to George W. Bush. After all, Bush didn’t hesitate to bury Joe Wilson’s report prior to the Iraq War (a report that contradicted the neocon propaganda campaign). Bush is perfectly willing to ignore neutral eyewitness reports to this particular incident. More troubling for him is the fact that the British are even admitting that they were closer to Iran, than Iraq.The British sailors were taken captive in a waterway that separates Iran from Iraq. Logically, the territorial waters would be split down the middle, but not according to Tony Blair’s government. One recent article reports “The British Government has published a map showing the coordinates of the incident… Accepting the British coordinates for the position of both HMS Cornwall and the incident, both were closer to Iranian land than Iraqi land… the Brits’ ‘fake map’ (claiming that over half the waterway belongs to Iraq) is being reproduced in all the major Western media, as if it represents something other than a complete fantasy. Hardly surprising, in our Orwellian age: what’s astonishing is that they expect there is anyone left who believes anything they say, no matter how many times it is filtered through the echo chamber of the ‘mainstream’ outlets. Journalism is dead: long live stenography. The Western media reported Blair’s certainty that the 15 Brits were in Iraqi waters as if it were gospel. The blogosphere is on it, however, and Blair’s lie had no sooner been uttered than it was in the process of being debunked….”
The US and Britain have satellites and ship-borne radar monitoring every square inch of the Persian Gulf. We have half the US Navy and a good portion of the British Navy in the Persian Gulf. Recently a US submarine bumped into a Japanese tanker because it’s become so crowded. There is simply no way that Iranian gun boats could have left their territory and done anything, but gotten themselves sunk by the overwhelming Allied force. The only reason an Allied commander would not press the “launch” button for an anti-ship missile to obliterate an Iranian gunboat is that IT WAS STILL ON THE IRANIAN SIDE. The British sailors had to be in Iranian territorial waters to get captured. There is no other logical explanation. The small rubber boat, the British were operating from is typically launched from a destroyer. Why wasn’t that destroyer protecting the boarding party? Why didn’t the British fire on the Iranians right then if the Iranians violated the border?
The Iranians were all set to release the one woman sailor just out of courtesy, but the British government insulted the Iranians with a barrage of accusations the day before her proposed release. A little diplomatic silence would have freed that sailor. There is only one obvious explanation for this behavior: The British government wants the Iranians to keep those fifteen sailors as prisoners so the Bush and Blair governments can use this incident as an excuse for war.