I’ve been poking around the ivory towers of the Internet, have dove searching into every self-important looking crevice, and have the scanned the planet around me for pseudo-intelligent life. I still cannot figure out where all the international law advocates have gone.

The Iranian capture of fifteen British sailors and marines has left the usually verbose critics of everything American silent. We now know that the holding of a few hundred terrorists at Guantanamo Bay is a greater violation of international law than the unprovoked capture and detention of one the world’s greatest democracies’ soldiers in at best, international waters.

Well, I guess it’s okay because Iraq is a mess, and if the Brits were smart, they wouldn’t be there anyway.

Of everyone, The New York Times has the most finely tuned sense of selective apathy. The day the story broke, the Times buried it halfway through the A section. Days later, as the Iranian government revs up the propaganda mills and has become exceedingly defiant and bellicose, the Times isn’t even running updates that take up a single column.

Much has been made about the fact that because of American involvement in Iraq, we are logistically unable to assist the British and confront Iran.  But we are no longer flying sorties over Iraq or employing cruise missiles against Baathist military installations. At present, two American carrier groups are positioned in the Persian Gulf. To confront Iran one need not invade it, and the resources needed to make good on a credible threat of force are at present sitting idle.

The problem with Iran generally is that her theocratic drive to destroy Western culture shows no signs of abatement. The popular conception of a pro-Western student movement has been overblown for some time. It makes me laugh.  I’ve never seen a nation where students supposedly do so much, from now allegedly being prepared to overthrow the Supreme Leader who controls Iran, all the way back to taking over the American embassy in 1979 (alas, the truth is that it was Iranian revolutionary soldiers, not students, holding our diplomats hostage). Fanciful dreams that there lies within Iran a bubbling cauldron of pro-Westernism that will moderate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s stated propensity to annihilate the West and kill the world’s Jews is not based upon fact, considering first that Ahmadinejad’s anti-semitism and his Islamist brand of dispensationalism were both well known at the time he was elected president by the Iranian people.

As is always the case, the question of Iran is one of net present value. Is it less risky and less costly, both monetarily and in lives, to confront the regime with real consequences now, or is it more astute to wait and see what happens later? A natural but misplaced hesitancy stemming from the fallout following the Iraq invasion clouds the equation. The threat from Iran is not yet imminent, but with Russian and Chinese assistance to the Islamic Republic, it soon will be. Time is not on our side. I hope that Tony Blair’s government and the Bush administration realize this before it is too late.