Missing bits of information
An interesting post by Antony Loewenstein provides some useful yet glaringly ommitted information on the British sailor crisis with Iran:
The British Government has published a map showing the coordinates of the incident, well within an Iran/Iraq maritime border. The mainstream media and even the blogosphere has bought this hook, line and sinker.
But there are two colossal problems.
A) The Iran/Iraq maritime boundary shown on the British government map does not exist. It has been drawn up by the British Government. Only Iraq and Iran can agree their bilateral boundary, and they never have done this in the Gulf, only inside the Shatt because there it is the land border too. This published boundary is a fake with no legal force.
B) Accepting the British coordinates for the position of both HMS Cornwall and the incident, both were closer to Iranian land than Iraqi land. Go on, print out the map and measure it. Which underlines the point that the British produced border is not a reliable one.
posted by Iqbal Khaldun @ 10:53 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Really interesting - I just went and read Craig Murray's original blog post and all the comments.
It makes you wonder how much of the stuff in the media is conveniently 'simplified' in a way that greatly affects the judgements we make on issues.
While I was in Geneva and the only English-language channel on the tube was CNN all they would repeat was how terrible it was for Iran to parade the sailors. The only criticism of the British Government they aired was that they hadn't done enough to get the sailors back.
Nationalism is a powerful tonic, most of all because it gets enough people to shout out in support of the powerful's narrow interpretation of what patriotism, while at the same time shutting up the majority who understandbly are too uncertain about the facts to readily support calls for the condemnation of the official enemy.
To put it another way - the genius of nationalism isn't necessarily that it gets everyone's support. No, the genius is that it creates a degree of authority which most of us are too scared to challenge for fear of ridicule or simply because the issues are too complex to warrant holding to one rigid point of view either for or against.
I'd read Pepe's piece at atimes but I hadn't seen this - thanks.
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