Where Is That Border?

[One certainly hopes this or some comparable action will not start escalation towards violence from which there would be no winner. Lest we forget, Iran has 3 times the population of either Iraq or Afghanistan and is well armed and positioned to disrupt the region totally. Our military forces are already over-extended and we have learned from Iraq that 'Shock and Awe' tactics merely create chaos -- not stable regime change. Needless to say, what Blair and Bush see as a justified war on Iraq, most of the rest of the world (and especially the Arabs and Iranians) see as a stupid latter day effort at imperialistic colonization! Ed Kent]

............................

Excerpt from a Monitor article on motives for the Iranian capture of the British sailors:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0329/p99s01-duts.html

For all the possible political motives however, the main cause of the showdown could be a centuries-old dispute over the water border between Iran and Iraq. It began with the 1639 Treaty of Zuhab between the Persian and Ottoman empires, which divided the land without a careful survey. Disagreements through the 1980s, and some of the fiercest fighting in the eight-year war between the two nations occurred along this border. The Associated Press quotes Lawrence G. Potter, an associate professor of international affairs at Columbia University, who says that even to this day the exact demarcation has not been established. "The problem is that nobody knows where the border is," Potter said. "The British might have thought they were on their side, the Iranians might have thought they were on their side."
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Israel_Palestine
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FindingHumaneJobs
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net