The Redhunter

It should be noted that the author of this piece, Abbas Edalat is identified at the bottom of the editorial as the founder of the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran.

No better, however, is an opinion piece in The Telegraph in which the author states that "Our Government's tactics were vindicated by the result." His only suggestion for the future is "the need for additional force protection for exposed naval units." We are reassured that in the long run "the episode will come to be seen as relatively minor in the sweep of events of the region." More appalling, perhaps, are the comments at the end by Britons; the majority of them are firmly in the leftist blame-Britain and America first crowd.

On the other side the editors of The Telegraph conclude in their lead piece that " They're free, but Britain has been humiliated". They are critical of the Blail government and the Royal Navy. However, they do not examine the long-term effects of such actions.

The editors of National Review make no bones about their position

By committing an act of war, Iran has simultaneously made itself look peaceful and made the West look impotent. ...

The way the crisis played out will have serious consequences in the Middle East. Iran proved that it is the region’s dominant power. Could any other country have attempted this and gotten away with it? Syria? Saudi Arabia? Egypt? Surely not. Britain, meanwhile, reinforced Iran’s view of the West as a decadent society that does not respond effectively to provocations and need not be feared. Perceptions matter: Recall the conclusions Osama bin Laden drew after the American retreat from Somalia. What we can expect now is greater aggression, from both Iran in particular and Islamists in general.

Kathleen Parker, writing in the Washington Post, made a particularly good point, I thought, when she said that

When a pretender to sanity such as Ahmadinejad gets to lecture the West about how it treats its women, we've effectively handed him a free pass to the end zone and made the world his cheerleaders.

Not only does the Iranian president get to look magnanimous in releasing the hostages, but he gets to look wise. And we in the West get to look humiliated, foolish and weak.

Quid pro Quos ?

In the resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis the world was not told the full story, only that Khrushchev agreed to remove his missiles from Cuba. It was only years later that we discovered the secret deal whereby President Kennedy agreed to remove our Jupiter missiles from Turkey.

It is probable that there was a secret deal made this time, too. Charles Krauthammer thinks so

"The quid pro quos were not terribly subtle. An Iranian “diplomat” who had been held for two months in Iraq is suddenly released. Equally suddenly, Iran is granted access to the five Iranian “consular officials”—Revolutionary Guards who had been training Shiite militias to kill Americans and others—whom the U.S. had arrested in Irbil in January."

Mario Loyola agrees

As some of us predicted, the quid pro quo included concessions by the United States—we know that Iranian officials will now be allowed to visit the five Iranian "diplomats" detained by the United States in Iraq for supporting the insurgency.

There may be more that we don't know about.

Why The Quick Release?

Walid Phares (author of "Future Jihad"), concludes that

The risky Iranian adventure was smartly designed but poorly executed. There seems to be a gap between the “architects” (both inside and outside Iran) and the Ahmadinejad mediocre execution of the plans. At first, Iran was successful in steering the debate away from the UN sanctions then by executing a grotesque masquerade Tehran was on the verge of causing a disaster to itself. This is when the advisors quickly suggested a remedy that is to move to plan “B” abruptly. This leap salvaged Ahmadinejad from an imminent disaster.

"Plan B" took place when Ahmadinejad issued his pardon and said that he was releasing them as "a gift to the British people." Phares says that Ahmadinejad decided to release them "and invest heavily in their “merciful liberation.” "

Key mistakes, Phares says, were made by Iran when they paraded the British sailors and Royal Marines around on TV, making them put on what was an obviously rehearsed and scripted show. Once this propaganda machine got going, few people around the world believed the Iranian story about where the Brits were when they were captured. Rather, their heavy-handed tactics made it seem obvious that their intent was to create an incident in order to distract the world from Security Council action on their nuclear program. Once the game was up, they felt they had no choice but to change course.

Lastly, Phares makes the point that since the seized British sailors and Royal Marines were carrying out a UN-mandated inspection, any Khumeinist trial would provide the perfect causus belli for U.S. military action against the regime. In other words, they captured the wrong people to suit their goals.

Consequences

The bottom line is that Britain was humiliated and although Ahmadinejad and his fellows mishandled the situation they scored a propaganda victory. While it is impossible to know all that is going on behind the scenes in the Iranian government, it seems likely that this will encourage the Khumeinists that they can provoke us without fear of serious consequences, at least in the short term.

Bashar al Assad, dictator of Syria, also scored a small victory in this affair. His government is trumpeting the news that they played a role in the release of the captured Brits. Coming on the heals of Speaker Pelosi's disgraceful visit to Damascus, this can only shore up the Alawite regime.

One thing that is bound to be examined are the actions of the Britons while in captivity.
It's easy to be critical when you aren't in their shoes, so I won't be. But you'd have to be blind not to notice that they seemed to give in in awfully easy to the desire of their captors to use them in TV propaganda pieces, smiling and shaking hands with Ahmadinejad. You don't have to read very many accounts of U.S. pilots captured in the Vietnam War, or for that matter of any US or British troops captured by the Germans or Japanese during World War II, to know that things simply weren't done this way in days gone by. American troops have a code of conduct for such situations that the British don't have or seem to have forgotten. As I read one British commenter say somewhere, "we've come a long way since Bridge on the River Kwai"

Naysayers will point to the risks in escallating the situation. Threats to blockade Iran's oil exports, or destroy their only refinery capable of producing gasoline, are risky. Total economic embargoes are risky. In the short run, those who say that the result vindicates the strategy of the Blair government have a point.

But it's all so erily similar to the provocations of Hitler's government in the 1930s. The horrors of The Great War (WW I) was something no one in France or Britain wanted to repeat. Much safer, and how painless, to engage in negotiations.

Middle Eastern societies are "honor" societies. Face is all-important. The Khumeinists were determined to humiliate us. They were sending a message to everyone in the region that they have the ability to humiliate the West anytime they want to. Many of us in the West do not understand this. The idea of "turning the other cheek" is I believe pretty much a Christian (and to some extent Jewish) one and something one doesn't find in Islam. In our modern age we want to be magnanimous in victory and humble in defeat. Our better side tells is to avoid responding tit-for-tat to slights and insults. Unfortunately not everyone plays by our rules. We must never fall into the trap of mirror-image thinking.

If anyone really needed it, the incident should also put to final rest the notion that the UN Security Council can be counted on anything. Krauthammer again

The capture and release of the 15 British hostages illustrate once again the fatuousness of the “international community” and its great institutions. You want your people back? Go to the EU and get stiffed. Go to the Security Council and get a statement that refuses even to “deplore” this act of piracy. (You settle for a humiliating expression of “grave concern”). Then turn to the despised Americans. They’ll deal some cards and bail you out.

Unfortunately, the Bush Administration doesn't seem to have leared the proper lesson. Just today we learn that Secretary Rice " is willing to meet one on one with her Iranian counterpart at an international conference on Iraq" But what exacty is she going to say? "Please stop killing our soldiers or we'll get really angry?" As long as Iran doesn't directly provoke the U.S., they have little to fear from us now with Congressional Democrats doing everything they can to protect them from the US military. My own idiot senator, James Webb, even introduced legislation to "prohibit the use of funds for military operations in Iran." I'm sure the Iranians were most appreciative.

All this episode can do, I fear, is encourage Ahmadinejad and his fellows to believe that the West is a paper tiger that they need not fear. They will continue to thumb their nose at the UN and continue work on their bomb. A weakened President Bush may not act unless Iran attacks us directly. If a Democrat gets in the White House in 08, they certainly will not act. When Iran gets the bomb, talk will turn to "long range containment". We'll quickly discover, however, that we're not dealing with athiest communists but with religiously inspired fanatics who don't buy into Western conceptions of Mutually Assured Destruction. And then the consequences of not acting more firmly in what seems at the time a relatively small matter of a few sailors and Royal Marines will be driven home to us in a stark and brutal way.

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The New Iranian Hostage Crisis
The New Iranian Hostage Crisis II
The Iranian Hostage Crisis: The Use and Misuse of "Soft Power"