i) The Independent
A failed American attempt to abduct two senior Iranian security officers on an official visit to northern Iraq was the starting pistol for a crisis that 10 weeks later led to Iranians seizing 15 British sailors and Marines.
ii) Terry Jones (of Python fame) in The Guardian's Comment Is Free
And what's all this about allowing the captives to write letters home saying they are all right? It's time the Iranians fell into line with the rest of the civilised world: they should allow their captives the privacy of solitary confinement. That's one of the many privileges the US grants to its captives in Guantánamo Bay. The true mark of a civilised country is that it doesn't rush into charging people whom it has arbitrarily arrested in places it's just invaded. The inmates of Guantánamo, for example, have been enjoying all the privacy they want for almost five years, and the first inmate has only just been charged. What a contrast to the disgraceful Iranian rush to parade their captives before the cameras! etc etc ad nauseum
iii) Jonathan Freedland in Comment Is Free (again)
Iran has emerged in the past four years as the decisive player (alongside Israel) in the region. As the patron of both Hamas and Hizbullah, and with its nuclear aspirations preoccupying the United States and the UN security council, it is Iran that is making the geopolitical weather. Credit for that belongs to George Bush and Tony Blair, whose war on terror removed Iran's biggest rival, Iraq, while handily knocking out the Taliban troublemakers in next-door Afghanistan. On the long list of disasters entailed by the Iraq calamity, the empowerment of Iran must rank very high indeed
iv) Daily Kos
As America’s chief ally in the war Tony Blair helped George Bush concoct, it certainly tainted itself with abuses of the sort given the seal of approval by Gonzales. So the cognitive dissonance that sounds when we hear Tony Blair trying to take the moral high ground in this matter is deafening.
Everywhere you go this week, make sure people are asking: what on earth are British gunboats doing in Iraqi or Iranian waters in a place called the Arabian or Persian Gulf thousands of miles from home?
Please send in any more examples of "it's all our fault" if you come across them
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