A paper tiger?

LAST WEEK, while the European Union celebrated 50 years of peace, freedom and solidarity, 15 Europeans were kidnapped from Iraqi waters by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. As I write, those 14 European men and one European woman have been held at an undisclosed location for nearly a week, interrogated, denied consular access but shown on Iranian television, with one of them making a staged "confession." So if Europe is as it claims to be, what's it going to do about it? Where's the solidarity? Where's the action?

Simply to describe the crisis in these terms is to see how far we are from the Europe of instinctive solidarity that European leaders like to believe we have -- and especially when it comes to armed forces abroad. Most Brits do not think of the captured sailors and marines as Europeans. They will look for more decisive action from the British government and then perhaps from the United States or the United Nations. It would not occur to them to look across the Channel for support, and they would be surprised to learn that Europe has more direct, immediate leverage on Iran than the U.S. does.

Many continental Europeans, if they have registered that there is a crisis at all -- and many will not have, because Europe's media are still mainly national in form and priorities -- will probably think of it as yet another consequence of a foolish, illegitimate Anglo-American military action in Iraq. They will see it as a problem for "them" (Britons and Americans) rather than for "us" (right-thinking, peace-loving Europeans).

Those who follow these things more closely may wonder if the Revolutionary Guard was not making an indirect tit-for-tat response to U.S. seizures of Iranians in Iraq, perhaps hoping for a hostage swap. Or perhaps it's an angry reaction to the U.N. Security Council resolution extending sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, which was passed a day after the kidnapping (its contents were well known beforehand). But I bet my bottom euro that none of these continental Europeans' synapses will have fired spontaneously with this thought: "Our fellow Europeans have been kidnapped, so what can we, as Europe, do in response?"