Of prisoners and enforced cooperation

[Skybird]

The British Guardian has released a comment on the sailors that I found to be very intelligent.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2052104,00.html

(...) But if Britain has lost, it is because of politicians and the battles they have chosen to fight, not the performance of the armed services. The army, which has borne the brunt of the conflict in Iraq and in Afghanistan, has undergone a huge change since the end of the cold war. Tony Blair - who came to office wondering whether British forces would ever fight again - has used the military to support a sweeping vision of national interest that has little to do with old certainties, or even the patriotic pressures that sent the taskforce to the Falklands. In Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq and Afghanistan British forces have ended up fighting in conflicts that make a nonsense of nostalgic cries for captured British troops to reserve their response to name, rank and serial number. Warfare, in the form that the government has chosen over the last decade, has made much wider demands on loyalties and skills - and in the main, the armed forces have responded impressively. (...)

In German medias I red that both in British and American medias there is partially some really humiliating witch-hunting going on, I for example also red the editorials by Ralph Peters (who is an unknown to me) in the New York Post.

The issue is wether the sailors should have accepted to really being abused and treated badly, even getting hurt, while not cooperating for the TV-appearance they made in Iran, or if it is okay that in captivity they told the cameras what there Iranian guards demanded them to do, to avoid that fate.

Some commentators say that in earlier wars, prisoners refused at all cost to cooperate to such degrees.

Some days ago I red on the BBC site that a British admiral informed the interviewer that the British forces have rules in place that explicitly allows or even encourages British soldiers to "confess" what the enemy wants them to confess if that helps them to ease their situation.

I assume that we all knew when those Iranian TV news where broadcasted that the confessions most likely were useless because they had been done under more or less pressure.

I find the witch-hunt that some newspapers are conducting, disgusting, and aiming at the wrong people. the sailors probably performed remarkably well under the ROE they had to operate by, and during their imprisonment. If there is criticism worth to be fired at people, then it should go towards those who threw Britain into a series of stupid wars that were politically run under stupid and incompetent strategic assessment, and those who made sure that the patrols in the gulf are running under ROE that practically demanded British soldiers to give up without fighting if being confronted by Iranians, since a showdown with Iran was wished by politicians to be avoided at all costs.

Welcome home the sailors, and don't grumble at them. But finally shoot this incompetent idiotic government who brought them into the mess so naively and dilettantish. Ralph Peters wrote that Churchill must vomit precious whiskey in heaven about this incident. I'm sure he does. But not about the sailors - but about Blair and Britain's ongoing political decline.

I came to this issue by this German news:
http://www.welt.de/politik/article79...verhoehnt.html

Ralph Peters:
http://www.nypost.com/seven/04072007...lph_peters.htm
http://www.nypost.com/seven/04062007...lph_peters.htm
http://www.nypost.com/seven/04072007...lph_peters.htm

I assume it is a safe bet that Mr. Peters in the place of those sailors would happily have accepted to get his "limbs broken", as he referred to prisoners in Vietnam, in order not to appear in front of Iranian cameras.

[CptSimFreak]

Red = color...just fyi

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

I don't think the British decision (whether it was by the officers or by the men) was particularly heroic. So indeed they shouldn't get decorations. It was correct and the intelligent thing to do.

It is one thing to resist interrogation for information. There is no such thing as infinite resistance, but if you are tough, you might be able to resist until your data becomes obsolete, or at least until they use drugs or beatings so strong that the interrogators themselves can't be sure you are still lucid enough to be able to tell the truth if you wanted to.

However, if the point of interrogation is to gain a confession, with no restriction on the methods used, the interrogated chances of "winning", even a relatively short fight, is extremely poor. Eventually your survival and the effects of proxity on perceived importance (seeing one your own guys getting shot feels 100x worse than hearing the deaths of a whole company that you knew only by designation.).

The rules might say "Hold out to the last", but the point of an officer is intelligent intepretation and weighing of the rules. Getting your guys shot for a bit of glory might be heroic (and that's if you didn't blab after the Iranians had shot all the enlisted and were coming to you).

There was no loss. The Brits probably knew very well that whether they intruded into Iranian waters is actually irrevelant. There would be about 10 people outside Iran that believe Iran and 5 billion that believe Britain (the remainder don't watch the news. What the Brit prisoners had or had not said is almost irrevelant.

There will be a loss if they didn't confess. It is hardly only the British that are squeamish about losses these days. Thanks to the Gulf War, the West in general now counts casualties by ones and twos, not by the thousands.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by CptSimFreak

Red = color...just fyi

"Was hat er gesagt...?"

[Gizzmoe]

Originally Posted by Skybird

"Was hat er gesagt...?"

"read" ist in allen Zeitformen "read", die Vergangenheitsform wird lediglich "red" ausgesprochen, geschrieben wird es aber "read".

[TteFAboB]

They didn't read Sun Tzu.

If the soldiers fail to live up to your expectations, the first to blame is their officer, or you.

If you train them harder, fix the problems encountered but they still perform poorly, only then it's their fault.

That's why the hierarchy exists.

I'm not a soldier. I have a very good resistance to pain but I've never been through any sort of physical torture. I can't judge those sailors then. I would prefer them to be like Rambo and resist pain, suffering and torture for weeks. It's easy to condemn them for not being the Rambo we want them to be, but then again, if we're going to judge them as weaklings, we better enlist right now and show them how it's done. We better be prepared to offer the alternative.

Good diversionism. Forget about Iran, nuclear bombs and the like, let's focus on the British sailors!

[Skybird]

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_ne...052699,00.html

Crazy, and for me a total . Has the MoD lost its mind?

It emerged yesterday that Iranian intelligence officers told the 15 captives they first became suspicious about their activities after watching an interview with one of them on British television.

A long shot flashing up in my mind: maybe the incident was an intended intrusion into Iranian waters, to provoke the Iranians in exactly the way they later reacted? It would explain the lacking reaction of the Brits, and their home ship. It would also expolain why in such a dangerous environment the ROE as they had been described wre still valid. Good opportunity to make Iran the number one enemy again, and focus war-tired public attention towards more streamlining with the government's intended political course towards Iran. Also making Ahmadinejadh looking like a dangerous fool. -

Admitted this is thinking around two or three corners. Which is common practice in chess.

[Ishmael]

Originally Posted by Skybird

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_ne...052699,00.html

Crazy, and for me a total . Has the MoD lost its mind?

A long shot flashing up in my mind: maybe the incident was an intended intrusion into Iranian waters, to provoke the Iranians in exactly the way they later reacted? It would explain the lacking reaction of the Brits, and their home ship. It would also expolain why in such a dangerous environment the ROE as they had been described wre still valid. Good opportunity to make Iran the number one enemy again, and focus war-tired public attention towards more streamlining with the government's intended political course towards Iran. Also making Ahmadinejadh looking like a dangerous fool. -

Admitted this is thinking around two or three corners. Which is common practice in chess.

I personally think this had more to do with the Iranian diplomats arrested by US forces in January in Kurdistan. The Iranian govt. is not stupid. They've been dealing with US provocations on both borders for over a year now. They also knew that any overt act against the US would invite reprisal raids on Iran. They bagged the Brits as a target of opportunity to swap for their diplomats. Once those diplomats were back in the news, the brits were released in a "magnanamous gesture".