Mick Smith - Times Online - WBLG

Go Now Des, Please Go Now!

So it was all the navy’s fault was it? The senior service was certainly to blame for the botched operation that led to the arrest of the 15 sailors and marines. But was it really to blame for the fiasco that ensued when they sold their stories? As we reveal today, it was not to blame at all. “The Centre”, the MoD press desk headed up by the Director of News James Clark, a former Sunday Times journalist turned spin doctor, told the navy it had no way of stopping the press buying the stories of the 15 so-called “hostages” from their families, so it had better go away and find a way of managing the situation.

Spare us the Apologies Des, Just Go. And take the Idiots With You

It is difficult not to feel sorry for Des Browne. There he was campaigning in Scotland, desperately trying to keep the Labour vote up, followed everywhere by BBC news teams, when he gets a phone call asking if it’s alright to allow the 15 sailors and marines arrested by Iran to sell their stories. The MoD’s media minders, so anxious now to blame the whole disaster on the Navy, must have recommended it or Browne would surely have said no. His mind distracted by the need to get the right message across on Scotland, he said yes, a decision he now regrets. For the second time in three days, he has apologized for the whole debacle. "Clearly with hindsight,” he said today. “I could have made a different decision." Well actually I don't feel sorry for him at all. He is paid to make difficult decisions and he got an easy one spectacularly wrong.

Blame the Navy and the Government not the Captured Sailors and Marines

The MoD has mounted a major operation to divert attention away from the dismal performance of the Royal Navy in allowing 15 of its members to be captured by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. I make no criticism of how they themselves reacted to their situation. Given the fact that they were armed with only a few pistols, they could scarcely have taken on their captors.

It is the naval commanders who put them there who need to take the blame. Allowing the captured sailors and marines to make money from this by selling their stories to the press, as the MoD plans to do, will be highly divisive. The only female, Leading Seaman Faye Turney, will make large sums of money while others make relatively little. But the MoD sees it as a way of ensuring the blame for what happened is solely placed on the Iranians with none of it sticking to the politicians and bureaucrats who have starved the forces of the money and time it takes to keep an efficient armed forces in place. Having complained rightly about their exploitation by the Iranians, it could not wait to get them home to start exploiting them itself to cover up the sort of appalling incompetence that we have come to expect from the MoD but never expected to see from the Royal Navy.

On this Iraq thingy...

We should be careful in interpreting the differing positions of Blair and Bush on talking to Iran and Syria as some sort of Damascene conversion on the part of the Prime Minister. Blair is of course right. We should be bringing them into the process. In fact it would have been pretty helpful if instead of slamming them as part of the axis of evil, we had been talking to them from the start. After all in the immediate aftermath of the allied invasion, Iran was pretty desperate to hold talks with Washington but these were rejected in favour of a policy of threats that only talked up the hardline idiots in Tehran and Damascus at the expense of the pragmatists who understand we all have to live together.

But to get back to Blair, don’t go expecting him to stray too far from the President’s line and don't expect too much from these talks. You won't get much from either Tehran and Damascus by going into the talks treating them like pariahs as Downing St seems determined to do, in a pretty obvious nod to the US rhetoric. This looks to me to be just a half-hearted and pretty inept case of tough guy, soft guy, and no prizes for guessing which of the two great world leaders gets what role!

The Neo-Cons' Next War - Has it Already Begun?

The real reason why Bush has repeatedly blocked a ceasefire in Lebanon is that the killing is not about the Lebanese, to an extent as far as the US administration is concerned, it is not even about Hezbollah. It is about Iran.