BERLIN, April 5 (UPI) -- The staged release of 15 British sailors by Iran as an Easter "gift" to Britain relieved people in Europe, but it did nothing to improve the West's position in the struggle over Iran's controversial nuclear program.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday played the show master in a well-staged media event that bordered the surreal.
In an hourlong speech, the Iranian leader spared no opportunity to lecture the West for its wrongdoings in the past (U.S. support for Saddam Hussein in the 1980s) or the present (the West's mistrust of Iran's nuclear ambitions).
He accused Britain of showing no "respect" to women because London had deployed British soldier Faye Turney, the mother of a 3-year-old girl, to the Persian Gulf, where she was detained along with 14 of her comrades by Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Some of these guards were awarded medals for their bravery in capturing the Britons; London, Ahmadinejad added, had not been "brave enough" to "confess its mistake over entering Iranian waters."
In a dramatic turn of the bizarre event, Iran's president, who has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map," then, citing humanism and the "influence of the Muslim Prophet," said Iran "forgives these 15 people and gives their freedom to the British people as a gift."
Like a good host saying goodbye to his guests, he shook hands with the 15 British sailors (who had been dressed in new suits), and wished them "good luck."
"Some people outside Iran may have believed that captivity in Iran is like a vacation, but they don't know how many people have been tortured and executed here," Bahman Nirumand, an Iranian expatriate and critic of the Iranian regime who now works as a publisher and journalist in Germany, wrote Thursday in a commentary for Spiegel Online.
While the 15 soldiers who returned to London Thursday said they were treated with respect by the Iranians, one thing is clear: For roughly two weeks, they were turned into propaganda pawns and playthings of Iran's diplomatic power games.
"It was a game of muscles, and Iran tried how far it can go," Erwin Haeckel, an Iran expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations, told United Press International Thursday in a telephone interview.
The European press Thursday unanimously praised Ahmadinejad's news conference as a "clever move" by the Iranian hardliner. After all, he tried to portray his government as one that can be reasonable, even noble, obviously hiding the fact that the arrest of the soldiers had been harshly condemned by most of the globe's governments.
Ahmadinejad delivered a "sophisticated piece of political theater, in which the president turned what had become a diplomatic disaster for Iran into something of a personal victory," U.K. daily The Guardian wrote.
While Iran looks to gain from the release -- the British have gained the freedom of their soldiers, if nothing else -- the domestic situation in the Islamic republic has not become one bit clearer.
"The question that still remains is: What is Ahmadinejad's standing? How independently can he decide? I assume that the decision to let the soldiers go came from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei," Haeckel said.
Ahmadinejad has come under pressure in Iran for a poor domestic track record as president; the West, however, has not yet been able to exploit that weakness. Diplomatic initiatives by the United Kingdom, France and Germany -- the so-called EU 3 -- to convince Tehran to stop its nuclear enrichment program have been fruitless. In the United States, officials are unwilling to negotiate directly with Tehran until it stops enriching uranium, with the most aggressive rhetoric coming from Vice President Dick Cheney, who (if Seymour Hersh is to be believed) would prefer nothing more than a military first strike against Iran.
On Wednesday, The USS Nimitz and several other U.S. warships left San Diego for the Persian Gulf, where the U.S. military presence soon will be greater than shortly before the war in Iraq.
Observers fear a war with Iran is imminent, also because of the recent spat involving the 15 soldiers.
"The militarists in Iran, one of whom is Ahmadinejad, play into Washington's hands; they are not afraid of military confrontation," Behrouz Khosrozadeh, an Iranian expatriate and political expert at the University of Goettingen in Germany, wrote in a commentary for Thursday's Berliner Zeitung daily. "Such was the message that was to be communicated through the arrest of the British soldiers: Your armada in the Persian Gulf does not impress us at all!"
