In a tidal wave of maritime melodrama that could only grace these soggy isles, the family of a British sailor has bellowed for ‘justice’ after a US strike sent tremors through the Persian Gulf’s already nervy waters. The sailor, a chap who presumably swapped his wellies for flippers and a sense of invulnerability, is now the reluctant poster boy for Anglo-American bungling in a region where you can’t sneeze without hitting a sanctions list.
The incident, which occurred amid what the blazers in Washington call ‘rising tensions’ (their euphemism for ‘we’ve been poking the hornet’s nest with a drone’), left the sailor with what I can only describe as a ‘significant emotional event’ – that is, he got caught in the splash zone of a US Navy’s attempt to discourage Iranian speedboats from getting too friendly. His family, bless their British stoicism, have now demanded ‘answers’ and ‘accountability’, as if such items exist in the dusty cabinet of international diplomacy.
Let us, for a moment, untangle this Gordian knot of absurdity. The US, in its infinite wisdom, has been conducting a kind of naval pantomime off Iran’s coast, where they pretend to be the world’s police force while Iran pretends to be a misunderstood neurotic with a nuclear chip on its shoulder. Into this theatre of the preposterous sails our hero, a Briton whose main crime was presumably trying to haul in a bit of fish or sell some insurance to a Norwegian tanker. Now his family, clutching Union Jacks and lawyers, want the world to know that ‘justice’ must be done.
What, I ask, does ‘justice’ even mean here? Does it involve a formal apology from the Pentagon, a bouquet of flowers from the USS Whatever, and a free lifetime supply of Pimm’s? Or perhaps a UN resolution condemning the US for ‘excessive use of force against a floating target’? The very notion is so delightfully quaint that I suspect the family has been watching too many episodes of ‘Yes, Minister’ and mistook diplomacy for a nursery game.
The broader context is a gasping farce: Iran, a nation that treats negotiation like a game of chess with a cobra, has been ratcheting up its jittery rhetoric. The US, meanwhile, has a president whose idea of conflict resolution is to send a strongly worded tweet while his generals fiddle with sonar. And here we have a British sailor, caught in the crossfire of two macho nations flexing their maritime muscles. His family’s cry for justice is a beautiful, tragicomic plea in a world where ‘justice’ is a rubber stamp that gets lost in a filing cabinet labelled ‘pending since 1956’.
But let’s not be too cynical; for the family, this is a genuine tragedy wrapped in a geopolitical puzzle. Their sailor, a man who probably just wanted a quiet life with a cargo of tea and biscuits, is now a pawn in a game where the rules are written in invisible ink by men with gold braid and no sense of irony. I, for one, hope they get their justice, even if it’s delivered as a sternly worded letter from the Foreign Office, apologising for the ‘inconvenience’ and offering a complimentary upgrade to the next British Airways flight out of Tehran.
In the meantime, I shall raise a glass of lukewarm gin to the sailor’s family, and to the eternal human desire for a tidy resolution to a spectacularly messy world. Justice, like a calm sea, is a beautiful illusion.
