Kind ol’ President Ahmadinejad

On March 23, 2007, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard surrounded and detained 15 British Royal Navy personnel. This happened off the Iran-Iraq coast, in an area of water that is currently disputed by Iran. The British personnel were in two teams, eight sailors in one boat and seven Royal Marines in another, on a routine boarding and compliance inspection of a merchant ship in Iraqi waters because of the smuggling problem that exists in Iraq. After disembarking from the merchant ship, the British personnel were then detained by six Iranian boats and escorted to an Iranian naval facility.

The British should have protected their personnel and not accept the abduction of their sailors and Royal Marines, especially since they were in Iraqi waters and had a legitimate right to be there. The British should have also taken a hard-line tone with the Iranians and if it had been necessary, an extraction team should have been sent in. What really happened, however, was the British knelt at the feet of the Iranians, begged the release of the hostages, and more or less left their personnel out to dry.

The Iranians, on the other hand, were able to make the British bend to their will, get letters of admission of wrongdoing on behalf of the personnel, and then threaten to try them for spying and intruding on Iranian space. To cap that all off, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad then gave the British something he called a “gift” in honor of the upcoming birthday of Muhammad and the Easter holiday, and then pardoned the British personnel.

How kind of President Ahmadinejad! Especially if you take into account his history with the West. I can bet that he is having a change of heart right now, and we should stop worrying about his nuclear program, his “Wipe Israel off the map” talk, the Holocaust denial party that Iran held in 2006, and those pesky militants that keep crossing the Iraqi-Iranian border and supply the Iraqi insurgents with more weapons! He even supports family values! In his hour-long press conference on Wednesday, he questioned the British government, “How can you justify seeing a mother away from her home, her children? Why don’t they respect family values in the West?”

Not only is he a kind leader, but he is a genius at politics. Taking hostage of the British personnel was a risky gamble for President Ahmadinejad, but it was a gamble he won. Not only did he make the British bend to his will, but he was inadvertently able to get a diplomat released. This diplomat was suddenly released by his captors in Iraq, after having been missing for two months. This occurred a day before President Ahmadinejad released the British hostages. Although he had not asked for it, the Iraqis felt it their duty to work to have this diplomat and five more people captured in Northern Iraq. These five others were described as part of the Quds Force, which is an elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. For President Ahmadinejad to potentially get these five soldiers back, in addition to his diplomat back, and then make the Western powers “outraged’ without really having them follow up on it is amazing. I would hate to see a political counterpart of his here in America.

President Ahmadinejad could not have planned this abduction any better. Not only was he able to continue a practice of detaining British personnel with hardly any repercussions (British personnel were also detained back in 2004), he was also able to make himself the victor in this standoff, being portrayed as the kind president that “pardoned” these offending foreigners, foreigners that could have been tried for espionage, a crime that carries the death penalty. In addition to that, he was able to make the British go back to a Chamberlain-esque response. With British rules of engagement being “stand back and do nothing,” also known as “de-escalation,” they tie their hands for future action, something that should not be done at this point of time with nations such as Iran. What should be done, and done soon, is a revision of the British rules of engagement with Iranians, especially taking in to light this event. Not only that, but the British should also make it highly evident that they will not take this sort of action from Iran again. That, and they should teach their personnel to not thank the leaders of countries that abduct fellow servicemen and women.