More than one war in history has been provoked by the unlawful seizure of sailors by a hostile nation. One of the primary factors behind the War of 1812 was the British impressments of American sailors from ships on the high seas. In the first two decades of the 19th Century, the United States launched repeated attacks against Moslem pirates in North Africa because they would not stop seizing Americans ships and crews. Iran’s action yesterday, in seizing three small British patrol boats and their crews, falls squarely within this tradition. This seizure of British vessels represents a blatant act of piracy and it should be punished as such.

The infamous outrage committed by Iran against the Royal Navy calls for a violent and deadly response. No ship of Her Majesty’s Navy, at any point in the world, should ever be sullied or molested by an Islamist boot. No sailor of that Navy should be detained against their without cause, let alone by a third-rate third-world cesspool. Iran should either be made to release the crews and ships (and pay appropriate reparations to both the individual sailors and to the British Government) or it should be punished by the force of arms. If any harm should befall a single British seaman, then Iran should pay a hundred-fold for that crime against all decent mankind.

Pirates, of course, were traditionally subject to summary execution. So it should be with the criminal scum responsible for this. It would be a truly glorious thing to watch a dozen or so members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard swinging from their necks high above the decks of a British frigate.

Not that I expect any of that to happen, of course. We live in a modern age. We’ve evolved above such brutal violence (and Britain doesn’t have the death penalty anymore, not even for offenses under the laws of war!). Of course, one wonders if treating a Third World nation who randomly seizes your sailors as though it were a nation with a legitimate place among the community of nations qualifies one as civilized.

An invasion of Iran isn’t the answer to this. Invasions should be reserved for the really big provocations. Historically, when this sort of thing happened the Royal Navy wouldn’t conquer the country responsible, they’d just move offshore and fire a few broadsides into their largest coastal city to ensure that the citizens of an upstart nation would remember their place in the world. That’s what this calls for: a gentle reminder to Iran delivered in the form of explosive ordnance.

If I were Tony Blair I’d order every available British ship to the region and, if the hostages were not released, I’d find the nearest Iranian ship and sink it. Iran has no modern anti-submarine weapons (they’ve got a trio of poorly maintained Kilo-class submarines), so I imagine that a pair of the Royal Navy’s nuclear attack submarines could do the job. Hell, even if they do release the hostages, I’d wait for one of Iran’s bigger ships to go out to sea, and then I’d order it sunk and deny any knowledge of what happened (the Brits must still, I imagine, have some of those old Second World War torpedoes they used to sink the General Belgrano about which would, of course, be rather hard to trace).

Of course if (as seems entirely possible, given recent events) a horrible fate should befall the British hostages, the appropriate response is obvious. With the help of the United States, Britain should destroy the entire Iranian Navy (and the Navy of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard) in a single afternoon and then, to ensure that one hundred Iranian terrorists dies for every British dead, all known bases of the IRGC should be blown straight to hell. This, of course, carries with it a serious risk of overkill which should be avoided at all times, except at the risk of underkill.