Kidnapped Sailor Update

The kidnapping of the sailors was a strike against the British, who had just turned another province over to local Iraqi control. It is also a direct affront to the nation of Iraq, whose territorial waters the sailors were captured in.

 As we’ve now gone beyond the three day turnaround of the previous incident, expect things to steeply and continuously escalate over the kidnapped British sailors, who were on a routine ship inspection in rubber dinghys called “RIBs” when they were captured by Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen in gunboats. This happened four days ago on Friday, shortly after several saber-rattling speeches by Iranian military leaders that kicked off the Iranian Naval war games Thursday.

Earlier this month, the Sunday Times of London reported that the Revolutionary Guards newspaper Subhi Sadek suggested seizing “a nice bunch of blue-eyed blond-haired officers and feed them to our fighting cocks.”

Keep in mind that in the background, Iran is still performing those naval military exercises, and US forces have moved two carrier groups into the gulf and started the war games we had previously scheduled.

Against this backdrop, I am reminded of the scene in “The Hunt for Red October” where Fred Thompson playing an Admiral on an carrier explains how even a minor mishap could send the balloon up when two hostile navies are in proximity to each other.

“This business will get out of control! It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it!”  — Admiral Josh Painter: [after running up to the USS Enterprise flight deck to survey an F-14 crash scene in the movie “The Hunt for Red October”]

The kidnapping of the sailors was a strike against the British, who had just turned another province over to local Iraqi control. It is also a direct affront to the nation of Iraq, whose territorial waters the sailors were captured in.

Russia reports on the US build up on Iran’s border, along with the naval build up.

Wall Street Journal has some good analysis of possible motives here.

Counterterrorism Blog asks where the UN is at.