LONDON: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran said Wednesday that he would immediately release 15 British sailors and marines who have been held captive in Iran since March 23.
Diplomacy is best defined as the art of building a ladder for the other guy to climb down. I was not hopeful that it would turn out thus so I really must tip my hat to British diplomacy here. Great ladder building
.Ahmadinejad said at a news conference in Tehran that he was giving the British military personnel amnesty and a pardon.
"I announce their freedom and their return to their people," he said. "They will be free after our meeting. They will go to the airport and will join their families."
The Iranian president said the decision to release the prisoners was not part of a swap with Iranian prisoners in Iraq.
"Our government has pardoned them, it is a gift from our people" he said.
A gift! Thanks
Captain Blackbeard Let's get these guys back on HMS Cornwall as soon as possible doing their jobs which I rather hope will involve a rather more proactive approach to Iran in the very near future.
Diplomacy is best defined as the art of building a ladder for the other guy to climb down. I was not hopeful that it would turn out thus so I really must tip my hat to British diplomacy here. Great ladder building
A gift! Thanks Captain Blackbeard Let's get these guys back on HMS Cornwall as soon as possible doing their jobs which I rather hope will involve a rather more proactive approach to Iran in the very near future.
2 comments:
Well, thank goodness it's only the index finger he's showing us!
I hesitate to pass judgement as I'm not somebody who has served in uniform, but one of the things that struck me initially is that it seems to me that (absent any Iranian coercive techniques that we don't know of right now) they really ought to have put up some resistance to going on camera and parroting the lines the Iranians fed to them. As I say, I'm a soft, squishy civilian and even if you're in uniform I suspect you probably can't know how you'd react to a situation like that until you're in it, but it seems to me that in principle I hope I'd be prepared to take a beating before going on camera and parroting their propaganda. I don't think I'd be able to pull an Anthony Farrar Hockley and keep my mouth shut while being put up in front of staged firing squads, but I like to think it'd take at least something obviously coercive before I'd go on telly and start making grovelling apologies and asking for our troops to be pulled out. Happily, I don't think it's had much of an impact on the British public, but I think it has done us some damage in the world at large.
Am I wrong? I'd be interested to hear from the various people who populate these comment boxes who have served in uniform.
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