DAR AL HARB/ISLAM - U.K./IRAN: "BRITANNIA REALLY DOESN'T RULE THE WAVES ANY MORE."

Iran laughs at Easter 'gift' of humiliation

The Iranian hostage crisis ended on Thursday with the 15 sailors and marines returned unharmed as a ‘gift’ to Britain. Sarah Baxter, Michael Smith and David Cracknell on how Iran played our government and military for fools.

In his crisply ironed uniform, Simon Massey described how he thought he was going to die. His mother Carol and sister Hannah listened with quiet pride as he recalled his ordeal: “It was going through my head I was never going to see my family again.”

After he was seized by Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Massey was blindfolded and flown to Tehran with his hands tied behind his back with plastic cable. The most terrifying moment came when he was lined up against the wall with his crewmates and “everybody’s imagination started going”.

One of the crew members vomited. Unable to see through their blindfolds, the other British captives feared his throat was being cut. Behind them, they heard weapons being cocked. “It was just crazy, we were sat there with our heads up against the wall, still blindfolded and handcuffed, and I just thought, that was it, that was going to be it for the 15 of us.”

Massey and his crewmates continued to suffer during their imprison-ment. They spent days in isolation in small stone cells, 8ft by 6ft, and were interrogated at night. Massey, 22, was held in solitary confinement for eight days, although he managed to communicate with a fellow seaman by tapping with his knuckles in Morse code.

“Little things like that got us through,” he said, but he admitted that on day nine he broke down before recovering his composure.

As we now know, the smug boast of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, that the captured sailors and marines were shown the virtues of “Islamic hospitality” during their 13 days in captivity was a sinister mockery of the truth.

Faye Turney, the only woman on board, was kept apart from the rest of the crew and was the first to be singled out for propaganda purposes. She was told that all the others had been freed except her, before she was paraded in a hijab and began apologising for Britain’s alleged misbehaviour. The other sailors and marines were told they had to confess to trespassing in Iranian waters in the Shatt al-Arab or face seven years in jail.

The emotional and psychological intimidation was tough, but certainly not the worst in the history of warfare — nor dissimilar to the experience of some Iraqi and Afghan prisoners of coalition forces in the Middle East. And as some commentators noted, their treatment was positively mild compared with those abused by US forces in Abu Ghraib two years ago.

Asked whether he and his comrades had undergone a mock execution, Massey replied: “It’s a fine line to draw.”

Nothing has proved to be simple in this sorry tale of bungling and misadventure, in which the Iranians played the British government and military for fools.

Whether Ahmadinejad, circus master of the bizarre hostage spectacle, has won the lasting propaganda victory he seemed so confident of last week, is another matter.

The deaths of four servicemen, including two women, in Basra on Thursday following the explosion of a massive bomb under their vehicle, underscored the brutal nature of the conflict in which Britain is engaged and refocused attention on Iran’s support for terrorism.

Despite the occasionally farcical nature of the crisis, this was no Navy Lark. The image of British servicemen thanking Ahmadinejad for his gracious treatment and asking for forgiveness for “apparently” trespassing will not be easy to erase, particularly in the Middle East. As one Iranian commentator said mockingly: “Britannia really doesn’t rule the waves any more.”

The British showed themselves to be “Marmite-eating surrender monkeys”, said Michael Rubin, the American neoconservative and an Iran analyst. Others observed that the flowery “goody bags of dishonour” containing Persian sweets, pistachio nuts, CDs and vases, with which the servicemen returned, seemed designed to emphasise their wimpishness.

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Pertinent Links:

1) Iran laughs at Easter 'gift' of humiliation