{"id":429,"date":"2007-04-05T09:41:37","date_gmt":"2007-04-05T08:41:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=429"},"modified":"2007-04-05T09:41:37","modified_gmt":"2007-04-05T08:41:37","slug":"the-kidnapping-of-military-personnel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=429","title":{"rendered":"The kidnapping of military personnel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Naturally we are all delighted at the release by the Iranians of the 15 British naval personnel who were detained for 13 days. But many questions remain including: Were the British really in Iraqi or Iranian waters or, to put it another way, were they in waters that the Iranians <i>think<\/i> are theirs (see <a href=\"http:\/\/threescoreyearsandten.blogspot.com\/2007\/03\/thalweg-and-sinuosity.html\">this interesting blog posting<\/a>)? Why were the British detained and held rather than simply warned and released? Why were the British personnel seemingly so publicly compliant? Was some sort of deal done for their release?<br \/>\nMeanwhile let us not forget the position of two kidnapped Israeli soldiers over whom the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/2006_Lebanon_War\">Lebanon war of 2006<\/a> was fought and arguably lost.<br \/>\nOn 12 July 2006, Hezbollah launched diversionary rocket attacks toward Israeli military positions near the coast and near the border village of Zar&#8217;it. At the same time, a Hezbollah ground contingent crossed the border into Israeli territory and attacked two Israeli armoured Humvees patrolling on the Israeli side of the Israel-Lebanon border, near Zar&#8217;it, killing three, injuring two, and capturing two Israeli soldiers <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ehud_Goldwasser\">Ehud Goldwasser<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Eldad_Regev\">Eldad Regev<\/a>.<br \/>\nThe fate of these two Israeli soldiers is still unknown. They may even be in Iran. They may be dead. Hopefully they are still alive and will soon be released to join their families. The Israeli response to the kidnapping of these soldiers was a massive over-reaction, but that does not excuse the continued detetention of these soldiers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Naturally we are all delighted at the release by the Iranians of the 15 British naval personnel who were detained for 13 days. But many questions remain including: Were the British really in Iraqi or Iranian waters or, to put it another way, were they in waters that the Iranians think are theirs (see this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}