Marines home safe but what was it all about?

Lines in the sand? Boundaries in the water? Who draws them?

I have watched with some interest the marines captured by Iran and recently released. I hope this is not a process of demonising Iran prior to a military strike. Whilst the human interest story is legitimate the facts of the border dispute, as far as I have read or seen on the BBC news, have simply been ignored.

Let us set aside the offers of cash to servicemen and women to tell their story - clearly they had a terrible time but it wasn't that terrible compared to the deaths of 8 British servicemen since these others were captured. Nobody is offering hundreds of thousands of pounds for the story of the families of the dead. Let us also set aside for the moment the fact that the BBC so rarely gives any voice to the majority view that our soldiers should not be in Iraq. Let us also set aside the fact that the Iraqi government had asked the US government, several weeks ago, to release the five Iranians captured by US troops. The US is "reviewing the request" - as Craig Murray, former ambassador to Uzbekistan, said of this it is "no clearer illustration that the idea that Iraq has a sovereign government is a sham".

According to Craig Murray - OK so he's a bit of a maverick but he is also a former Head of the Maritime Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office - there is a legitimate border dispute in the area. So there is no legally agreed international boundary where the incident took place and those pictures of GPS coordinates are just spin. The official story of what our marines were up to also seems fishy, they would under international law have been allowed to enter Iranian territorial waters if in "Hot pursuit" of terrorists, slavers or pirates. But they weren't doing any of those things, they were searching a boat for smuggled vehicles attempting to evade car duty - this makes no sense in such a sensitive area, a fact of which the ships captain was fully aware.

Before the spin doctors could get to him, Commodore Lambert (Captain HMS Cornwall) said: "There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that they were in Iraqi territorial waters. Equally, the Iranians may well claim that they were in their territorial waters. The extent and definition of territorial waters in this part of the world is very complicated".

So were we involved in trying to provoke Iranian response? See more extracts below from: http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/

Fake Maritime Boundaries

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.

None of which changes the fact that the Iranians, having made their point, should have handed back the captives immediately. I pray they do so before this thing spirals out of control. But by producing a fake map of the Iran/Iraq boundary, notably unfavourable to Iran, we can only harden the Iranian position.

British Marines Captured By Iranians

The capture of British Marines by Iran has happened before, then on the Shatt-al-Arab waterway. It will doubtless be used by those seeking to bang the war drum against Iran, though I imagine it will be fairly quickly resolved.

Before people get too carried away, the following is worth bearing in mind. I write as a former Head of the Maritime Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The Iranians claimed the British soldiers had strayed into Iranian territorial waters. If they had, then the Iranians had every right to detain them for questioning.

The difficulty is that the maritime delimitation in the North West of the Persian Gulf, between Iraq, Kuwait and Iran, has never been resolved. It is not therefore a question of just checking your GPS to see where you are. This is a perfectly legitimate dispute, in which nobody is particularly at fault. Lateral maritime boundaries from a coastal border point are intensely complicated things, especially where islands and coastal banks become a factor.

Disputes are not unusual. I was personally heavily involved in negotiating British maritime boundaries with Ireland, France and Denmark just ten years ago, and not all our own boundaries are resolved even now. There is nothing outlandish about Iranian claims, and we have no right in law to be boarding Iranian or other shipping in what may well be Iranian waters.

The UN Convention on the Law of The Sea carries a heavy presumption on the right of commercial vessels to "innocent passage", especially through straits like Hormuz and in both territorial and international waters. You probably won't read this elsewhere in these jingoistic times but, in international law, we are very probably in the wrong. As long as the Iranians neither mistreat our Marines nor wilfully detain them too long, they have the right.