British Navy will escort UK-flagged ships through Strait of Hormuz

RT
Sat, 04 Jan 2020 22:47 UTC

© AFP/Glyn Kirk

HMS Defender

The UK Defense Ministry has ordered its Navy vessels to provide "protection" to all British-flagged ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf following the death of Iran's top general in a US drone attack.

The ministry has ordered the Royal Navy's HMS Montrose frigate and HMS Defender destroyer to prepare for accompanying all vessels sailing under the British flag through the Hormuz Strait — the only passage from the Persian Gulf to the ocean that lies between the Iranian and UAE coasts.

"The government will take all necessary steps to protect our ships and citizens at this time," Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said, commenting on the decision. The move comes after the US killed Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards' elite Special Force, on orders from President Donald Trump.

The attack dramatically heightened tensions in the Middle East as Tehran labeled it an act of international terrorism and vowed revenge. Washington maintained it was an act of "self-defense." London apparently share its 'strategic ally's' position as Wallace also said that the US "is entitled to defend itself against those posing an imminent threat to their citizens" under international law.

Comment: Craig Murray enlightens us on the dubious doctrine that recategorizes 'imminent threat' to be anything, any time, anywhere. For an attack to be 'imminent' does not require it to be 'soon'. Indeed governments can kill to avert an 'imminent attack' even if they have no information or indication anything is about to happen.

See: How lies and the Bethlehem Doctrine brought about the illegal murder of Soleimani

However, he also called for "de-escalation." The spike of tensions in the Middle East apparently unnerved the British government as the UK Foreign Ministry already advised its citizens against traveling to Iraq and Iran.

"Given heightened tensions in the region, the Foreign Office now advise people not to travel to Iraq, with the exception of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and to consider carefully whether it's essential to travel to Iran," Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said in a statement.

London already sent its warships to patrol the Hormuz Strait amid another crisis related to Iran earlier this year. The tensions were sparked in early July after the seizure of an Iranian-flagged tanker by the British marines off the coast of Gibraltar. Iran denounced the act of "state piracy" and retaliated by seizing a UK-flagged vessel as it entered the Strait of Hormuz.

The Iranian tanker was released in late August and the British one a month later. The crisis was instrumentalized by Washington, which used it to call for a coalition to police Western tankers traveling through the Hormuz Strait — and London was one of the first to join it.

Comment: See also: Strait of Hormuz Closure Biggest Problem for UK'

British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab went on the BBC to fully endorse Washington's justification of the targeted assassination of the commander of Iran's Quds Force as an act of self-defense. The Trump administration claimed the man was planning attacks on American citizens and that preemptively killing him on Iraqi soil was OK.

"It was General Soleimani's job description to engage proxies, militias across not just Iraq but the whole region not just to destabilize those countries but to attack Western countries who were legitimately there," the top British diplomat told Andrew Marr. "In those circumstances the right of self-defense clearly applies."