Aussie Navy defeated Iran kidnap attempt

By James Lewis

BBC News sheepishly dug its toes into the sand, and admitted yesterday that:

Iranian naval forces in the Gulf tried to capture an Australian Navy boarding team but were vigorously repelled, the BBC has learned. ...

When Iranian Revolutionary Guards captured the British sailors and Royal Marines in March, it was not exactly their first attempt. It turns out that Iranian forces made an earlier concerted attempt to seize a boarding party from the Royal Australian Navy.

The Australians, though, to quote one military source, "were having none of it". The BBC has been told the Australians re-boarded the vessel they had just searched, aimed their machine guns at the approaching Iranians and warned them to back off, using what was said to be "highly colourful language".

The Iranians withdrew, and the Australians were reportedly lifted off the ship by one of their own helicopters. "

Wow. That sounds like a real Navy. With folks who "use highly colourful language" when a bunch of thugs try to kidnap them. Naturally the Iranians backed off, because they were looking for easy marks. They found them in the Brits a month later.

The BBC News story does not admit, however, that the same IRGC thugs also succeeded in kidnapping British personnel in 2004, in pretty much the same circumstances.

And just this week, a formal British Ministry of Defense inquiries found that no one was responsible for the March kidnapping farce. It was just an "an unfortunate accumulation of factors," dontchaknow?

Something has gone deeply awry over there, probably at the political level, allowing the military to (rightly) blame the politicians. But there's nothing wrong with British Soldiers elsewhere --- see Michael Yon's combat reporting from the Royal Lancers in the Basra region.

They test, and they test, and they test. And when they find weakness, they strike. That's how predators act. If push comes to shove in the Persian Gulf, chances are that the British Navy will be targeted, because as far as Ahmadi-Nejad is concerned they have shown their jugular to the wolf.

James Lewis blogs at http://www.dangeroustimes.wordpress.com/