I wasn’t planning another post on the Iranian captives, but the news that they’re being allowed to sell their stories is going to prolong the controversy anyway.
What strikes me now, as all the media pundits reflect on the lessons to be learned etc. etc., is how widespread the view is within the commentariat that the Iranians ran rings around us, that they humiliated us, that they’re all tactical geniuses compared to our stupid dithering leaders, that Ahmadinejad strengthened his hand, and so on and on. Andrew Sullivan in the Sunday Times is fairly typical: “Deal or no hostage deal, Tehran shows it has the West taped”.
I don’t believe this for a moment. We’ll maybe never know exactly what happened in Iran’s top circles, and why they did what they did, but to assume that it was all part of a brilliantly conceived scheme which went exactly according to plan seems ludicrously improbable to me.
What’s funny is that much of this is coming from those same commenters who decry the West’s loss of faith in itself when it confronts tyranny, with so many only too ready to blame the West for bringing it on ourselves. Yet here we are, dealing in a civilised and diplomatic fashion with a gross abuse of the Geneva Conventions, and all we hear is that it was our fault: the sailors should have been more defiant; the Navy should have prepared them better; the politicians should have been tougher. And didn’t those clever Iranians play a blinder?
It’s not the behaviour of the captives which will have made the Iranians think they’ve won a propaganda victory – everyone knows they weren’t speaking freely. What’ll be cheering them up no end is the way the Westerm media are now doing the job for them.
In the circumstances, though I find the decision to allow the captives to sell their stories unwise and more than a little tacky, I can understand the thinking. If newspapers are trying to push the stories, at least they’ll be forced to present them in a sympathetic light.
Update: and here, right on cue, is Melanie Phillips:
The British marine hostage saga is a debacle of the first order – a grim parable of the degraded state to which Britain has now descended and an alarming portent for the free world in its fight to survive. Relief at the safe return of the 15 sailors, and the fact that we must always bear in mind that none of us knows how we would ourselves behave in such circumstances, cannot nevertheless mitigate the sickening realisation that the hostage fiasco is another terrible milestone in the west’s current suicidal trajectory of decadence and moral collapse….
Britain’s shame has been Iran’s gain. At a time of rising tension over the mortal threat posed by Iran to the free world, Britain handed it a victory which has strengthened it and made it even more of a threat. Britain’s strategic incompetence was matched by Iran’s flawless manipulation.
Mick Hartley 
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