I don’t see what Great Britain has to complain about, considering that they quite literally started it.
TWO British oil tankers with dozens of crew on board were seized by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards less than an hour apart today in the Gulf.
The Government’s Cobra committee is holding an emergency meeting in Whitehall tonight after the Stena Impero and Mesdar were halted by troops in speedboats and helicopters and diverted to Iran.
The raids came exactly two weeks after Royal Marines boarded a supertanker off Gibraltar suspected of carrying Iranian crude oil to Syria – prompting Tehran to threaten “retaliation”.
British-flagged Stena Impero was sailing to the Saudi port of Jubail today but ship tracking data shows it veered off course with a sharp turn north at around 4.17pm UK time. Iran’s state news agency IRNA said it had been “impounded” and claimed the tanker had turned off its tracker, ignored warnings from the Revolutionary Guards and was sailing in the wrong direction in a shipping lane.
The Impero was surrounded by four vessels and a helicopter. State-controlled TV claimed the ship was seized because it was “violating international maritime rules”. Less than an hour later at around 5pm the Mesdar – Liberian-flagged but operated by the UK firm Norbulk Shipping UK – also turned sharply north towards Iran’s coast having been surrounded by ten speedboats after passing westward through the Strait on its way to Ras Tanura.
It looks like the neoclowns couldn’t get President Trump to bite, so they’ve got Theresa May doing their bidding in the hopes of enmeshing the US military that way. I suspect they’re desperate to start a war in the Gulf in the hopes of creating a distraction from the coming Epstein-related arrests. And I very much doubt that either the President or the U.S. Navy is going to fall for the neoclown antics.
One article on the Daily Mail finally gets around to admitting that the Iranian response was both provoked and measured by the initial British action.
Fears were raised that the Iranian authorities were trying to seize a UK ship in retaliation for the detention of the Grace 1 tanker. The Iranian ship was detained off the coast of Gibraltar on July 4 after it was suspected of violating EU sanctions by carrying a cargo of crude oil destined for Syria. The ship’s captain, chief officer and two second officers were arrested and bailed and an investigation is ongoing.
Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called the tanker’s seizure an act of ‘piracy’ on Tuesday and warned the UK to expect a response.
Of course they knew Iran would do something like this. However, I expect they were looking for a more violent escalation. It’s a little hard to bang the war drums when the other side is obviously just responding in kind to your own actions.