Sad, Pathetic and Downright Frightening

The Brits can no longer take care of themselves and are at the mercy of whoever wants to abduct their military personnel:

IT'S been a tough month for the British Navy. On March 7, it learned that Tony Blair's Labor government was going ahead with drastic cuts in its budget and number of ships. By this time next year, the once-vaunted Royal Navy will be about the size of the Belgian Navy, while its officers face a five-year moratorium on all promotions.

If that wasn't demoralizing enough, last Friday the Iranian Navy seized a patrol boat containing 15 British sailors and Marines, claiming they'd crossed into Iranian waters. They're now hostages and may well go on trial as spies.

The latest report is that the Britons were ready to fight off their abductors. Certainly their escorting ship, HMS Cornwall, could have blown the Iranian naval vessel out of the water. However, at the last minute the British Ministry of Defense ordered the Cornwall not to fire, and her captain and crew were forced to watch their shipmates led away into captivity.

There was a question whether the Blair government would end up leaving Britain with a navy too small to protect its shores. Now it seems to want a navy that can't even protect its own sailors.

The mullahs in Tehran clearly see the new pacifist trend in Britain not as a hopeful sign of future accord, but as supine surrender. Just as clearly, they have singled out Britain as the latest weak link in the Coalition fighting in Iraq and in the War on Terror.

If the Iranians can force Britain to join the other European powers on the sidelines in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan (where most NATO nations devote their time to finding excuses for not risking their soldiers' lives in combat), they will have virtually completed America's isolation from the rest of the world community. In effect, America's only reliable ally in Iraq and the War on Terror will be Australia - and a change of government there could well mean the loss of that ally, as well.

This will be a tragedy - but not for America. The United States has grown used to doing the fighting and dying the other industrialized democracies refuse to do in order to defend themselves and their interests.

Go ahead.  Make our day.

Europe insists on making the same mistakes, over and over:

Seventy years ago, another generation of British politicians believed that disarming themselves would help ease world tensions after World War One. Farsighted and progressive planners cut the Royal Navy by nearly two-thirds and ceased the fortification of vital naval bases like Singapore so as not to alarm other powers. In the name of international peace, Britain signed treaties formally limiting the size of its fleet, and as late as 1935 reached an accord with Adolf Hitler allowing him to build the submarine fleet that the Versailles Treaty had denied him.

Six years later, Hitler's U-boats were turned loose to harry British shipping and the Japanese stormed into Singapore, forcing the greatest mass surrender in British history.

Today, British politicians seem determined to make the same mistake.

What a sad state of affairs to see the Brits reduced to this.  Again.  Seems as though it's time for us to consider lend-leasing them some backbone.

If the hostages are finally released unharmed, it will have a lot more to do with the presence of two American carrier groups off the Iranian coast than anything Blair is doing - and the British will have learned that what they really lost when they gave up their fleet and abandoned the fight in Iraq is their own self-respect.

Melanie Phillips criticizes her government's lack of reaction:

Some commentators have languidly observed that in another age this would have been regarded as an act of war. What on earth are they talking about? It is an act of war. There can hardly be a more blatant act of aggression than the kidnapping of another country’s military personnel.

What clearly does belong to another age is this country’s ability to understand the proper way to respond to an act of war. When his Marines were seized by the Iranians, the commander of HMS Cornwall, Commodore Nick Lambert, did nothing to stop them and later said it was probably all a misunderstanding. If Nelson had been such a diplomat in such circumstances, Trafalgar would surely have been lost.

Our Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said the Government had been ‘disturbed’ by the incident. The Prime Minister took three days to say that the seizure was ‘unjustified and wrong’ and mouthed platitudes about the welfare of the detainees. Yesterday he talked severely of ‘moving to a new phase’.

My goodness, the Iranian regime must be shivering in its shoes. With what contempt they must regard us — a country that stands impotently by while its people are kidnapped and then does no more than bleat that it is ‘disturbed’.

What on earth has happened to this country of ours, for so many centuries a byword for defending itself against attack, not least against piracy or acts of war on the high seas?