I'm the sort of guy who takes sovereignty issues seriously. Normally I'd be outraged at the seizure of British sailors, even if I were sure they were in Iranian waters, it's clearly meant to provoke, and it's a more serious outrage to seize soldiers like this than it is to be a little inside territorial waters.

But I can't get very worked up about this - alarmed maybe, but not outraged. The US has been playing "catch and release" and sometimes just "catch" with Iranian nationals for some time - including seizing diplomats, who should be even more "off limits" than soldiers. No one in the West seemed to give a damn about that, so any screaming and whining and outrage about grabbing the sailors is just hypocrisy - the US has been taking hostages for some time and even if the UK wasn't directly involved, the UK never had a problem with it, and was most likely involved in the various deliberate provocations of Iran.

Just as with Israel - where the whining about some kidnappings of Israeli soldiers ignored all the Lebanese currently still in prison for the crime of resisting an Israeli invasion and occupation, the current debate seems to be ignoring the fact that the coalition that Britain is part of is currently holding Iranians. Why shouldn't Iran seize some hostages of its own? Why should only the West be allowed to grab hostages but if someone else does it's some great outrage?

None of this is to say that Iran should have grabbed hostages. It may have been a very stupid thing to do. But it's not some great moral outrage - it's just tit-for-tat. The US has been seizing Iranians more or less arbitrarily, and holding them in more isolated circumstances than these soldiers are being held in. I doubt the soldiers are being tortured - who knows what has been done to the Iranians seized.

So... geopolitically - this is gasoline on a fire. Morally? Yawn.