Derb: In surrendering without a fight, those marines were, apparently, obeying orders. We might disagree with those orders (I do), but it seems very harsh (to put it mildly) to condemn those who obeyed them as wimps. If anything, the opposite is true. As to their conduct after their surrender, here (from the First Post) is a rather more subtle, and (I suspect) more accurate analysis than anything that Ralph Peters has to offer:

The public performance of the 15 Navy hostages in Iran has become an interesting piece of theatre of the absurd—though the stakes are real enough. From Faye Turney’s sly, nervous smiles to Captain Chris Air’s camping it up in front of the wall map, it is clear the group have worked out a plan. Even their interrogators seem now to have worked out that the more this engaging crew gush with apologies and excuses about not knowing where they were, and they won’t do it again, honest, Guv, the less value they have as puppets of propaganda. No wonder the Iranians have said they won’t be putting the Gulf 15 on trial…Since they are not prisoners of war technically, the stiff upper-lippery of movie PoWs like Alec Guinness’s immortal Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai, is not available to them. Instead they have worked out a piece of theatre of which Machiavelli would approve: they have said everything their captors want to hear, no more, no less, and quite incidental to the truth.

The humiliation for Britain doesn’t lie in the behavior of these fifteen hostages, but in the incompetence of the government that let them get into this situation in the first place.