Nuclear Motives By Mario Loyola

There’s no denying it. Iran’s capture of 15 British hostages was a stroke of cunning — and a brilliant one at that. The mullahs were in a pickle. They had decided to do two things which were going to push Washington closer to military action. They needed a diversion or a smokescreen — some way to make the Bush administration blink. And so far, it has worked.
Iran knows that if the United States is “allergic to casualties,” as Gen. Wesley Clark once lamented, we are especially allergic to the casualties of our friends. With a pitifully weak navy and allergies of their own, the British were unable (or refused) to defend the sailors once they were surrounded; the commander of HMS Cornwall apparently ordered them to surrender. This despite the fact that British and especially American naval forces are putting pressure on Iran in increasingly aggressive ways — indeed the British navy was put on high alert weeks ago, in expectation of a bad reaction from Tehran. Now Tony Blair has asked Washington to stand back while he negotiates the release of the sailors from a position of weakness and utter humiliation. And what will get the sailors released? An apology is unlikely to be enough.

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