Never Mind Illogic, Let's Just Lie For War

Further to my post earlier today where I pointed out what seem to me to be serious flaws in the arguments we're hearing from the (mainly American) hard Right that Iran's seizure of 15 British naval personnel is an "act of war"...you don't have to worry about illogic if you're just going to flat out lie.

Cue the editors at National Review Online:

Iran has thrown down the gauntlet by hijacking 15 British sailors and marines in the Persian Gulf. Operating under a U.N. Security Council resolution, they were carrying out the inspection of an Iraqi ship suspected of smuggling oil. According to the British authorities, the 15 were in Iraqi waters, but in any case Iranian naval craft had evidently been prepared to strike whenever and wherever there was an opportunity. The rightful description of what occurred is piracy.

"Suspected of smuggling oil"? Only if the oil was in the cars the vessel was actually suspected of smuggling, as every statement from the UK government and every British media report which has addressed the matter has said from the very start. The rest of the editorial is the usual innuendo masquerading as evidence.

Now jump over to the NRO's Corner for a view of what may really be on many Rightwing movers and shakers minds, if not on those of their cheerleaders who really and truly want war to wipe out the insult of a the Teheran Embassy:

You might think the 2008 race is going to be about Iraq. I think it’s increasingly likely that the next presidential election will be about Iran.

...By election time, we’ll see a raft of conflicting estimates on just when Iran is likely to get a bomb. None of them will be completely reliable, but there will also be good reason to fear that the worst scenarios are true. Meanwhile, the anti-war left will invoke the Iraq intelligence debacle and deride all the guesswork as bogus fear-mongering. The Democrats will be deeply split, and harmed at that point by their now indelibly dovish reputation. But the Republicans will also be cautious about calling for war. Overall, if this turns into an Iran election, it will help the Republicans.

There you have it.

(Those serious about a foreign policy that isn't an extension of warfare by other means might want to read the BBC's guest op-ed by Dr Ali Pahlavan, the executive editor of Iran News, an independent newspaper published in Tehran as well as their report on the murky dividing lines of territorial limits in the area.)

Update The British media are reporting that later "today" (it already being tomorrow in the UK) the British government will release "maps, detailed co-ordinates and photographs of the area" which it says will prove the vessels were all in Iraqi waters at the time of the incident. As I and others have noted, though, what is or isn't "Iraqi waters" depends on who you ask. "The Iranians may counter that the borders inside the waters are poorly marked, 20 years out of date and disputed," notes the Guardian.

One other thing, as the Guardian and other British reports make clear and the UK government does not contest - the vessel the UK sailors were searching at the time of their seizure was Iranian, not Iraqi as the NRO editorial above claims.