This story is typical Euro-whining. All their problems are our fault. The fact is that Britain foolishly allowed its sailors to be sent into harm's way under ridiculous UN-dictated rules of engagment and then so failed to maintain vigilence that a fleet of Iranian patrol craft was able to surround their boats. Now they compound matters by basically begging the Iranians to come up with some way they can grovel to get their sailors back.
Let's have a reality check. Hostage-taking has been a staple of the islamist thugs who control iran for 30 years. If I were the British, I'd be worried less about these sailors and more about the personnel at the British Embassy in Tehran. Iranian-sponsored hezbollah took American CIA agents hostage in Lebanon and tortured them to death. Whatever we do to those bastards is warranted, in my view. If we had a chance to capture the head of intelligence for the Republican Guards, we would have been grossly negligent to miss it. The way to deal with an
Iranian response is to hit them back ten times as hard. Not get on your knees like Tony Blair is doing.
In a way we are responsible for the Iranian trouble-making. When they started meddling in Iraq years ago, we should have warned them off and if they continued, hit them with an all-out attack. Now we and the Brits will have to pay the price for that appeasement. Unfortunately, this is a recurrent theme. We haven't done anything to convince the Syrians that we are serious either.
I think it is pretty clear that the orignal Iraq invasion was a terrible mistake. We have compounded that mstake by trying to conduct a PC occupation, one that let the insurgency get started, that let thugs like al Sadr raise private armies and that tolerates open assistance by Iran and Syria.