POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY THE DAILY TELEGRAPH'S DANIEL HANNAN
Daniel Hannan, this is a colossally irresponsible piece whose only purpose can be drumming up war fever.
Daniel, are you joining up to go to go fight in Iran?
I didn't think so. Jingoes rarely have courage to match their bluster. And Brussels is so much more pleasant, isn't it?
Your words also reflect a regrettable unfamiliarity with facts. To put it plainly, they are uninformed.
There is little doubt that, overall, the Iranians are correct here.
They've done what any nation would do when a group of armed men were discovered in their waters. Daniel, I'm sure you'd be writing something very unpleasant about covert gangs of armed Iranians caught near the British coast.
The waterway in which they were captured has been in contention between Iraq and Iran a very long time, centuries. The soldiers involved undoubtedly well understood this.
Hussein attacked Iran and started a long, bloody war in part over it. Considering the size of the two countries, the losses of that war make it proportionately as great an event for them as the Second World War was for Britain.
Hussein was supported in that aggression during the 1980s by the United States, who supplied weapons and intelligence to Iraq and deliberately ignored Hussein's war crimes.
That same United States, of course, now threateningly occupies Iraq and almost daily makes menacing remarks.
But Iran has attacked no one, not in its modern history.
Please, the Iranian revolution, which has close to run its course as all revolutions do, reflected immense discontent and misery under the Shah. Savak, his secret police were specialists in pulling out fingernails in basement prisons.
And who put the Shah in place? Full marks, Daniel, if you said the United States. And the coup which put that dark creature in place overturned what kind of previous government? Why a democratically elected one, Daniel. One the United States didn't happen to like
The real danger here is that the United States uses this event as an excuse to attack Iran, just as Israel used the taking of two soldiers (who were covertly in Lebanon as provocation to start with) to destroy a quarter of Beirut, leave a wasteland of cluster bombs, and kill 1500 civilians.
The last thing we need is more mindless vengeance against Muslims. Besides the clear injustice, we'll all pay for it in decades of hostility.
