Ho Hum, More Government Lies Eagerly Swallowed By America's Incredibly Liberal Media

The Times of London has gotten the British government to cough up documents on the incident last March where Iran seized British sailors and held them for several weeks. Guess what?

Newly released Ministry of Defence documents state that:

— The arrests took place in waters that are not internationally agreed as Iraqi;

— The coalition unilaterally designated a dividing line between Iraqi and Iranian waters in the Gulf without telling Iran where it was;

— The Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ coastal protection vessels were crossing this invisible line at a rate of three times a week; It was the British who apparently raised their weapons first before the Iranian gunboats came alongside

Here's an op-ed the shockingly liberal New York Times published at the time, explaining how even though the Iranians are vicious insane lying barbarians, we shouldn't nuke them immediately:

Tony Blair has been talking tough about Iran’s seizure of 15 British sailors and marines on the Shatt al Arab, the waterway between Iran and Iraq. Mr. Blair is deeply reluctant to apologize, as Tehran is demanding, for Britain’s alleged incursion into Iranian waters. Global positioning data shows that the British naval patrol was more than a mile inside Iraqi waters...for the British, this is a painful lesson. It is rash to expose potential hostages to one of the most reckless and erratic regimes in the world.

Plenty of people in Washington would say that violent provocation of this kind shows that diplomatic engagement with Iran, as favored by Britain and other European nations, is wasted motion; that only harsh sanctions backed up by the threat of force can influence the wild men of Tehran, headed by the Holocaust-denying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Yet it is hard to punish masochists...

No matter how it ends, the seizure of the British sailors is likely to be viewed by most of the world as an Iranian victory. Thus it is unlikely to be Iran’s last affront to us. It is not the American way, but only patience, statesmanship and a refusal to respond in kind to outrageous behavior offer a chance of eventually persuading this dangerous nation to join a rational universe.

After the hostages were released, the appallingly liberal Washington Post felt the most important thing to publish about the incident was this:

On any given day, one isn't likely to find common cause with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He's a dangerous, lying, Holocaust- denying, Jew-hating cutthroat thug -- not to put too fine a point on it.

But he was dead-on when he wondered why a once-great power such as Britain sends mothers of toddlers to fight its battles...Not only does the Iranian president get to look magnanimous in releasing the hostages, but he gets to look wise. And we in the West get to look humiliated, foolish and weak.

Just because we may not "feel" humiliated doesn't mean we're not. In the eyes of Iran and other Muslim nations, we're wimps. While the West puts mothers in boats with rough men, Muslim men "rescue" women and drape them in floral hijabs.

The Times of London deserves credit here for carrying out something approaching journalism. Parts of the British media are less willing than the US media to amplify government lies, and in private the US and UK governments are aware of this. Here's David Manning, then British ambassador to the US, reporting back to the Blair government on a March, 2002 dinner with Condoleezza Rice:

We spent a long time at dinner on IRAQ. It is clear that Bush is grateful for your support and has registered that you are getting flak. I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was very different than anything in the States.

Fortunately, managing the US press has never been much of a challenge.

(story via John Caruso)

—Jonathan Schwarz