Playing Truthiness And Dare With Sailor's Lives

Despite compelling testimony from a career diplomat who headed the Foreign Office's maritime section from 1989 to 1992 to the effect that there are no recognised boundaries in the Shatt al-Arab area of the Gulf, testimony that has now been confirmed by the prestigeous German "University for the Federal Armed Forces" in Munich, both Iran and the UK continue to insist that they are definitely in the right.

In Iran, that stubborn insistence on what isn't true has led to the televising of scripted "confessions" from the detained British seamen and to noisy, scripted protests outside the British embassy in Teheran. Yet behind the scenes, the crisis is probably as much about factional jockeying for supremacy as about anything the Iranian's old Imperial master might have accomplished with 15 seamen in a rubber boat.

In the UK, that same stubborn insistence on what isn't true has led to more and more hardline rhetoric from wannabe Colonel Blimps, pining for the glory days of an Empire now past, at conservative newspapers such as the Telegraph and the Times. The Blimpoids have even spilled over into the American press, where they have had a meeting of minds with other wannabe Blimps - led by George Bush - who are pressuring Blair to be their proxy in wiping out what they believe to be the stain on their American Empire's honor dating from the Teheran embassy hostage crisis of '79.

Yet the Col. Blimps of both old and new Empires forget that Britain could only afford to act like an Empire when it still had one. The massive navy and army it took to conduct gunboat diplomacy could never be sustained by such a small island except by raping the resources of its colonies. We Brits took a decision that we would hand back the Empire, with all that entailled - and I for one am still happy we did.

On both sides, the game being played is "truthiness and dare". It isn't helping.