another sad chapter....

[Cott Tiger]

Phylo,

OK. so you have shifted from insisting the abduction was in Iranian waters to the territory now being “disputable” or International.

We are getting there, slowly but surely.

The co-ordinates given by the British for the abduction are generally recognised by international law as Iraqi. Even the expert in the article you thankfully drew our attention to, highlighted as much when he commented:

While the legal status and exact alignment of that boundary today are not entirely clear, it is difficult to see how Iran could legitimately claim sovereignty over the point in question.

As we all know the situation is not so clear when you use the Iranian’s falsified co-ordinates (both sets!). However, nobody in the international arena is giving those any credence.

Even the EU, hardly supportive of Britain’s Middle Eastern escapades, said all evidence clearly indicated the Britons were in Iraqi waters when seized and so the Iranian action "constitutes a clear breach of international law". The German Chancellor went one stage further and committed "full solidarity" of the European Union, adding, "We demand the immediate release of the 15 British soldiers."


I think we are going over old ground repeatedly here, so unless you can bring any new or fresh evidence to the table regarding this issue I think the debate is heading down a cul-de-sac.

Regards,

Andre

PS: Labelling me jingoistic is also rather laughable. I have been labelled many, many things in my life (plenty on this forum as it goes), but I can put my hand on my heart and honestly say I have never been accused of jingoism before. First time for everything I suppose.

[Reb]

Sid

I fought several "hopeless" actions and never laid down my guns until the entire country did so and there was no longer any thing left to fight for.

Are you saying that is what happened last week?

cheers
Reb

[Reb]

Early in my own service I noticed, somewhat to my surprise, that certain guys mysteriously failed to turn up whenever we went operational.

I gradually picked up on why: senior NCOs conveniently found tasks for a certain type of fellow that would keep them from putting their pals at risk.

Some folks just aren't soldiers no matter how many layers of camo cloth you wrap around them.

Apparenlty we are now pretending such men are soldiers after all, and girls too.

I have scant hope for Western Civ when major powers send armed mothers on operations. The armed "mothers" I'm used to working with were a whole nother variety and any kids they left at home were purely by accident!

cheers
Reb

[phylo_roadking]

OK. so you have shifted from insisting the abduction was in Iranian waters to the territory now being “disputable” or International.

We are getting there, slowly but surely.

The co-ordinates given by the British for the abduction are generally recognised by international law as Iraqi

LOL youre trying to do a Sid but sadly you're not as good as him!

No, the waters are either Iranian...or International; quite clearly on Iraqi TV at the time Iraq repudiated the treaty by which the geographical position the RN was in was Iraqi when the treaty was signed but to be subject to periodic rejigging due to the way the deep water channel between the sandbars change there so much and so regularly.

The co-ordinates given by the British for the abduction are generally recognised by international law as Iraqi

Nope, were Iraqi at the time the treaty was signed; neither Iraq or Iran carried out any of the ten-year surveys the treaty mandated - and Iraq has torn up the treaty since. No subsequent treaty was negotiated, nor either nation requested At best you could say it isn't Iranian OR Iraqi water, as its outside either nations minimum "three-mile limit"...but THAT makes them International, where the Iranians were perfectly at liberty under international law to protect their vessel from an act of Piracy!

Andre, you can have it one way or the other! EITHER they were carrying out a police action in a location under the terms of a treaty that doesn't exist any longer and with the permission of a government that tore it up....OR they were attempting to board a resisting vessel in International waters where the Iranians were at liberty to do what they did.

The German Chancellor went one stage further and committed "full solidarity" of the European Union, adding, "We demand the immediate release of the 15 British soldiers

Um, this is meant to mean - what? I'm sure the Iranians were quaking in their shoes! NO German Chancellor has been able to offer the FULL solidarity of Europe....since June 1940!

[Hans]

CT,

Why are you so sure that the officers are NOW telling the truth? If they were prepared to lie to save their skin in Iraq why not now in England.

As for honour, I'm sure it's the same in 2007 as it was in 1941.

As for not being at war with Iran. If anyone points a gun at me, it's war, whether the polies agree or not.

- Hans

[Cott Tiger]

Phylo,

Its getting all rather repetitive.

It’s you and the Iranians v the rest of the world on this issue.

I think you’re backing a lame horse Phylo.

A good healthy discussion, but I think we have taken it as far as we can.

All the best.

Andre

[phylo_roadking]

LOL just like Sid, run away time, eh?

And strangely enough, those nice Iranians who saw the errors of their ways and that they were in the wrong...now seem to want their agreed payback...or haven't you been scoping out BBC Online tonight?

Oh, and the press you were perusing but managed to miss any reports of questions over the maps?

From the Guardian's online news service.

Iran's Border Muddles Captivity Issue

Tuesday March 27, 2007 9:31 PM


AP Photo LON811

By ROBERT H. REID

Associated Press Writer

Shifting river channels, national rivalries and decades-old grudges all complicate what should be a simple question: Whether British sailors wer

e in Iraqi or Iranian waters when they were seized by Iranian forces.

The British insist the 15 sailors and marines were in Iraqi waters of the Shatt al-Arab waterway when they were captured Friday by naval units of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. At the time, the British were inspecting an Indian-flagged ship suspected of smuggling cars.

Iran is equally insistent that the incident occurred in its territorial waters. Officials in Tehran say they are investigating whether the British strayed into Iranian waters intentionally.

Neither side has released map coordinates to prove its case. Even if one side did, it is unclear that would be enough to convince the other.

``If this happened south of where the river boundary ends, knowing the coordinates wouldn't necessarily help us,'' said Richard Schofield of King's College in London, who is an expert on the waterway. ``We have to accept the British claim with as much salt as the Iranian claim.''

And, even if the incident occurred well before the spot where the river empties into the Gulf, the issue could be equally unclear - because the question of where the river border actually runs is as murky as the brown silt waters of the Shatt al-Arab.

The waterway is formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers at the southern Iraqi town of Qurnah. From there, the Shatt al-Arab, which the Iranians call the Arvand River, meanders south between Iran and Iraq until it spills into the northern Persian Gulf.

The waterway provides Iraq with its only outlet to the sea. Major port cities of both countries - Basra in Iraq and Khorramshahr and Abadan in Iran - lie on its banks.

Because the waterway is so important, both Iraq and Iran have long sought to promote their own interests in determining who has the right to use it - and under what conditions.

A 1937 treaty gave Iraq full rights to most of the Shatt al-Arab and fixed the border on the Iranian shore. Iran resented the terms, maintaining it accepted them only under pressure from the British. Lingering bitterness over the treaty may have influenced last week's Iranian action.

``The fact that British forces were involved made the (latest) incident especially sensitive for Iran,'' says Simon Henderson of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. ``Iran resented this display of British dominance.''

Iran scrapped the border pact in 1969. Four years later, Algeria mediated another deal setting the border in the middle of the river's most navigable channel. The river splits into a multi-channel delta as it nears the Gulf.

But Saddam Hussein tore up that treaty in 1980 and invaded Iran, setting off a bloody eight-year war.

Although the war ended without a formal peace treaty, both Iraq and Iran have generally accepted that the border runs down the middle of the main channel.

But the channel shifts due to silting. Because the two countries have not agreed on updated charts, that means there is no universal agreement on exactly where the border line runs.

If the seizure occurred near the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab - which is likely - the issue becomes even more complicated because Iraq and Iran have never agreed on each others' claim to Gulf waters near the mouth of the waterway.

Without such an agreement, international law requires countries not to extend their territorial waters ``beyond the median line with neighboring states,'' said Martin Pratt of the University of Durham in Britain.

But defining that line is difficult because of conflicting claims to rock formations, sandbars and barrier islands in the shallow waters of the northern Gulf, Pratt said.

As a result, there may be ``legitimate grounds for arguing for a different definition'' of those median lines, Pratt said.

``Until a boundary is agreed, you could only be certain that the personnel were in Iraqi territorial waters if they were within 12 miles of the (Iraqi) coast and, at the same time, more than 12 miles from any island, spit, bar or sand bank claimed by Iran,'' said Craig Murray, former chief of the Maritime Section of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

That means ships operating near the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab - where marshes and sandbars make navigation difficult and where ``ownership'' of the water is ambiguous - could easily run into trouble.

``There's a lot of room for making mischief, if that's what you want to do,'' Schofield said.

The questions were always there, even if you didn't choose to see them. When the MoD DID go public with coordinates and maps, they actually only mentioned ONCE that the map YOU seem to be relying on, their charts made public...have absolutely NO relevance to the Algiers Agreement of 1975...the Navy's charts were created from satellite imagery in 2002! The Iranians and Iraqis haven't agreed any sort of a border in this area since the end of the Iran-Iraq war....it actually turns out Saddam's burning of the treaty on TV was in 1980! There's been no agreed border there since then.

By the way, noone has mentioned the Cornwall's Lynx helicopter....

[Cott Tiger]

LOL just like Sid, run away time, eh?

We have done eleven pages Phylo, I think we have given it a fair crack of the whip, so I hardly think you can accuse me of running. Resorting to playground taunts is demeaning of you.

Regards,

Andre

PS Your latest link/article brings absolutely nothing new to the table. It is pretty much a regurgitation of the BBC article we have already discusssed at length. Like I say, it's getting rather repetitive.

[phylo_roadking]

Only repetitive in that you said categorically that there was no query over the map on the BBC - and I proved you wrong

You said categorically there had been no discussion of it in the rest of the press, and I've proved that wrong.

I said up the thread that this was very obviously an ambush set up by the Iranians, and you argued categorically with that; within 24 hours it became common knowledge that it ...was an ambush set up by the Iranians. Facts proved you wrong.

....and by the way, saying we've discussed things enough is NO way to start refuting ANY of the maritime law or treaty (or non-existence of one) issues that have arisen in the last two pages, is it? You did that once before on a long thread on Bomber Harris when mere facts started going against you. Here its the "facts" being less factual than they should be and that you've taken them to be is what's caught you short. Feel free to leave the discussion but there's a lot more on this to go, I'd hate you to miss the really good stuff...

And you haven't answered Hans' question - why do you accept categorically that the various statements made on the position of the vessels by the British government and UK forces' personnel are right - the same British government that lied to get us into this war?

As Reb says, there are major question marks over the conduct of all the British parties involved, not least the behaviour of the personnel themselves. Blustering your way through all those concerns just doesn't cut it.

Even Sid has admitted to agreeing with my concerns over how they were left in the water to fend for themselves...and Sid, go and track down the details of the overflight of the incident by the Cornwall's Lynx to raise more questions in your mind about what the chain of command did to these guys.

And Andre, at the top of this thread, you said about me questioning if the British government or chain of command colluded in this somehow? It might help you understand things a little clearer if you went and chased down that story too.

[Rajin Cajun]

The Iranians aren't very good at this. A very complete ripoff of Star Trek. Reminds me a lot of the Kobayashi Maru Scenario where they are lured in to a muddy area and then snatch and grabbed in hopes of creating an International Incident or Intergalactic in the case of Star Trek.

As to being letdown by your chain of command being a valid reason to surrender I could find several men who would say otherwise. Ever read Tom Clancy's "Clear and Present Danger"? That is based off a real op that a certain admin....*coughreagencough* purposefully cut off. How do I know that a friend of mine now retired who served with the 75th Ranger Regiment knew men from the mission. I would not doubt for a second that the Royal Navy would let these men be captured in order to fulfill a larger goal.

[phylo_roadking]

The Iranians aren't very good at this. A very complete ripoff of Star Trek. Reminds me a lot of the Kobayashi Maru Scenario where they are lured in to a muddy area and then snatch and grabbed in hopes of creating an International Incident or Intergalactic in the case of Star Trek

Yes...but who is it wants an international incident with Iran? As of tonight its very clear what the
Iranians wanted from it - their five "diplomats" arrested in Kurdistan. but there's at least one party in the Gulf at the minute that wants a war with Iran...

[Rajin Cajun]

Well phylo there is only one country in the ME that has threatened open nuclear conflict if Iran even looks at them funny because they held a conference to investigate a said incident that helped in creation of said nation. Which I find ironic threatening Nuclear Holo...Destruction while pitching a fit over a said incident.

[phylo_roadking]

LOL I didnt say one nation in the Middle East/Gulf, I said one party.....

[Rajin Cajun]

Oh must have been confused. Are we talking about the Communist Party of the Soviet Union?

[phylo_roadking]

I was thinking more the GOP