Historical precedent is one reference when trying to assess the last fortnight. Her Majesty's sailors were snatched in allied waters by Iran and were at least legally maltreated, drawing a response from London that generosity defined as forbearance. Today, it was announced that all captured hands would be let out.
Only one event can be precisely compared: that being the last time Britons were seized out of turn by Iranians, which was just under three years ago, captivity lasting only three days. The 1979 Khomeinist mobbing of the American embassy in Tehran and the 1982 Falklands War are germane to the belligerent nation and injured nation: the first, a kind of inaugural ceremony for a brutal theocracy; the second, a stultifying lesson to Argentina in the extant duties of a protector. Noted in passing, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis may most plainly show what elected men are willing to go to war over and if so, when.
Dissimilarities are obvious. Tony Blair has at his command nuclear weapons but is not John F. Kennedy, either in terms of obligation or temperament. Iran's compass is a regional one, widened through insidious, rarely overt, actions. And from what the public has seen of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's letters, Tehran's title may have all the ebullience of Nikita Khrushchev but none of the penmanship.
A cursory summation of the crisis — Kennedy discovers atomic weapons in Cuba, confronts Moscow and occludes Soviet convoys, Moscow accedes and strips Cuba of its arms — deludes. The White House was reluctant to believe that the Soviets would solve their problems with intercontinental ballistic delivery by placing limited-range missiles about one hundred miles from the United States. Kennedy would remain dubious for six weeks, from late August to mid-October, until photographic proof was brought to his bedside study.
The president was only, if ever, resigned to the eventuality of striking Cuban launch pads if Moscow could not be castigated into a rescission. He contemned Curtis LeMay and the general's stolid preparation for aerial bombardment, in Richard Reeves' biography telling his staff of the military, "If we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong." There was deliberation, vacillation, in the Oval Office. A naval blockade and stateside mobilization came to be the favored policy. John Kennedy disregarded protocol several times, withholding reply to the enemy's targeting of U2 flights and even the fatal downing of one of the surveillance craft airborne over Cuba.
At the end of two weeks, a couple of days before Moscow's salient would be sheared off by American warplanes, the Politburo's concession, under pen name Khrushchev, was sent over the radio. From Reeve's account, John F. Kennedy likely thought of his threat of force as more of a bluff — the Soviet yield was peripety, a miracle.
Reeve's own summation was that the president "could not risk nuclear war or even send troops to die" for the subjects of contention. American victory was not unqualified. Missiles in Italy and Turkey, depicted as little Cubas off a Russian coast under the tint of moral equivalence as well as Khrushchev's own fervid correspondence, were soon after removed. Their strategic function was maintained as they were superseded, but a certain political and moral penalty was paid. Up to and during the confrontation, the president was braced by the country's support. A year earlier, nearly nine in ten Americans wanted the army in free Berlin, war or not; and welcomed Washington to devise new atomic weaponry even if Moscow was still abeyant.
In October 1962, a majority in the United States wanted a blockade, but not an invasion of Cuba. John Kennedy had a minority party rebuking him for not acting sooner or more firmly, and still navigated limits other than those self-imposed. Today's Blair government is burdened with complacency in politics and culture, restrained by low martial strength, and meanwhile continues its attendance at most fronts of the war. As of this morning, all sailors will return alive.
Although the prime minister is suffering invective, it isn't clear whether charges of pusillanimity spring from something more than pique. If Tony Blair and his American ally will keep the atomic bomb from Tehran, and the decisive moment is still years ahead, then Iran's harassments will be ignored. Attacking the Khomeinists for those unfortunate fifteen would have duly satisfied patriotism; justice, too. What about strategy?