Pawns

I've been wondering what drove Iran to kidnap British seamen and women, and to continue to hold them hostage. To a Western mind, it seems rather incomprehensible. Apparently Tony Blair can't believe it, either. Writing in the British newspaper The Independent, commentator Matthew Norman termed it a "blatant act of brinkmanship." No one outside of Iran seems to quite know who is holding them.

I guess we need to consider the neighborhood. In Iraq, a series of bombs in a marketplace left, according to one account, the bodies of headless children lying amid the corpses of adults. Sorry, I know how unmannerly it is to talk about such gruesome matters. But we are at least responsible in part for this holocaust of innocents-and so it is not innapropriate to remember who is paying the price for our meddling.

Now Britons have been trapped in this geopolitical chess match, not least because the Labor Party (no, Tony Blair) so strongly allied itself with Washington that the black hats have no fear in taunting it. Who knows which way this will go and how horrible it can get? The whip was taken out of British and American hands long ago-now it is being used against them.