Mar 25, 2007 
The arrest of 15 British sailors by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards is a worrisome development. The immediate concern is for the safety and well-being of the sailors, of course. Let us also hope that the sailors are released before tensions escalate and push nations closer to war.
Captain Ed notes that Iran’s trying the sailors for espionage would be a violation of the Geneva Conventions. You remember the Geneva Conventions — they’re some old treaties that Alberto Gonzales thinks are “obsolete” and even “quaint.”
Over the next few days expect Britain and Iran to haggle over whether the sailors were in Iranian waters or not. The Iranians claim to have evidence the sailors deliberately entered Iranian waters. The Brits say the sailors were “miles” inside Iraqi waters. An Iraqi fisherman who claims to have seen the capture says the Brits were on the Iraqi side of the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab waterway.
The British sailor episode bears a resemblance to the U2 Incident. For the young folks: In May 1960 the Soviet Union shot down a U.S. U2 spy plane that had entered Soviet air space. President Eisenhower at first denied the plane and the pilot were engaged in espionage; he insisted that if the plane had been in Soviet air space, perhaps the pilot was lost. But the Soviets had the pilot, Gary Powers, in custody, and they had film taken with camera equipment installed on the plane, and eventually Eisenhower was forced to admit that, yes, the plane had been on an espionage mission. The Soviets tried and convicted Powers of espionage; he was imprisoned for two years, then swapped for a Soviet spy in February 1962. The U2 Incident contributed to an escalation of tension between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. that culminated in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.
Then we had leaders who really didn’t want to go to war. As Glenn Greenwald documents, we are not so fortunate now. And compared to current Iranian leadership, Nikita Khrushchev seems almost reasonable. Bad times.
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