The winner is ... Iran!

The 15 British sailors and marines have been released in a goodwill gesture by Iran. It was a masterstroke by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Western press is endlessly speculating who is a hardliner and who is a moderate, invariably portraying Ahmadinejad as a hardliner and Larijani and Khamenei as moderates. There is no doubt that Ayatollah Khamenei calls the shots in Iran, but it was Ahmadinejad who basked in the limelight, quoting from the Quran, lambasting Britain and the U.S. and finally magnanimously setting the 15 free.

In his Dutch-language blog from Tehran, NRC's correspondent Thomas Erdbrink asked who was the winner of the stand-off. The majority said it was Iran, a few chose Erdbrink himself (as he could write a few stories for the newspaper) and a lonely soul said Britain won.

The question in whose waters the 15 were captured will probably never be answered. The border is not fixed, which means there is no internationally recognized border, and a kilometer to the left or the right justifies nothing. The bottom line is: the British shouldn't be there, they should be defending the mouth of the Thames. Period. No so-called “U.N. mandate” can change that.

To celebrate the birthday of the Prophet [May Peace Be Upon Him] and Easter, Iran showed it could be generous. Can anybody imagine George W. Bush inviting the prisoners of Guantanamo to the White House, changing there orange jump suits for Western suits and set them free? They are all, except perhaps a few, innocent souls who have never crossed a border to commit the crime of aggression.

We all may disagree with certain aspects of Ahmadinejad's policy, but he is a statesman of a great nation. Some in Iran called for the execution of the British soldiers, but still Ahmadinejad set them free. Defusing the crisis was probably the will of the majority of the Iranian people. The overwhelming majority of the American and British people want their soldiers to leave Iraq. Do their so-called democratically elected leaders listen to the voice of their own people? Not at all! Their soldiers continue to murder the fighters who oppose the occupation, not to mention innocent civilians.