There has been considerable exaggeration concerning our so called “humiliation” at the hands of the Iranians by way of their seizure of fifteen Royal Navy personnel on 23^rd March 2007 and the alleged consequential loss of our military prestige.  That the abduction was allowed to occur reeks of incompetence on somebody’s part, but once it had taken place, we were left twisting in the wind until events took their course.

During the course of the past one thousand years the English, and latterly the British, have suffered numerous such “humiliations”.  There have always been steady supplies of tin-pot rulers and sometimes extremely powerful enemies who have seized our citizens or military personnel and subjected them to ritual, personal humiliation and sometimes even death.  It is the furore in the aftermath of such incidents that reveals our true mettle. These enemies always assumed the ease in which they inflicted the humiliation, was a sign of our weakness.  It was never so.  Retribution always followed by one means or another, even though the score being settled might be years in the coming.  These little embarrassments do no more than to strengthen our resolve to ensure that they do not happen again, so easily.

The seized personnel were pilloried for allowing themselves to be used for propaganda purposes by the Iranian Regime.  Regimes that pay no attention to the conventions of war have oft used captured soldiers for propaganda purposes.  The Chinese and North Koreans did so in the Korean War and likewise the North Vietnamese almost two decades later.  As we are not at war with Iran, it is not clear what proportionate response could have been made to ensure the earlier release of the hostages.  Besides, our military personnel cannot be expected to behave in a heroic situation on each and every occasion demanded of them, particularly when they are not at war with those who ambush them.  Not every imprisoned serviceman will behave like the prisoners of Colditz.  Even in Wellington’s Peninsula Army, arguably one of the best ever fielded by this country, seasoned soldiers ran away from time to time.  The Duke knew that most of them would return and fight another day.  Sometimes it is just not a good day to die.

Any argument that the abduction occurred because of our military weakness or lack of moral fibre is fatuous.  In many situations it is not militarily possible to rescue hostages, unless you are willing to spark the Third World War.  The mighty United States was forced to negotiate the return of their embassy staff seized by the Iranians on 4^th November 1979 and held for a little over fourteen months. Negotiation was the means of release for the crew of USS Pueblo, held for eleven months after being attacked and seized in international waters by the North Koreans on 23^rd January 1968. North Korea has never paid the price for that act of piracy.

Now it is only our pride that is hurt.  Only three centuries ago Arab slave traders regularly raided villages on the southwest coast of England, snatching thousands of free born Englishmen and women into slavery.  In July 1625, when as now, England possessed one of the most formidable navies in the World; these Islamic corsairs of Barbary sailed up the Bristol Channel, captured Lundy Island and raised the standard of Islam.  Now that was really embarrassing.