Blair Becoming Stern With Iran Over Captured Soldiers

Up until this point British Prime Minister Tony Blair has remained relatively diplomatic about the fact that Iran captured 15 of his marines and soldiers four days ago. However, in a show that his mannerism is beginning to change, today he warned the Iranian government in Tehran that if they did not free the captured soldiers then this situation would move into a “different phase.”

Iran allegedly captured the solders because they had intentionally intruded into Iranian waters, or at least that was the story over the weekend. Now, Iran is saying that they are interrogating the soldiers to see “whether or not their intrusion was intentional.” Who knows what they’ll say today or tomorrow.

My guess is Iran will back down and free the soldiers. Sure, they’ll hold them as long as possible and try to look like they’re not folding, but in the 11th hour they’ll return them to Britain. They really don’t have any other option, unless they are in fact trying to start a war.

Capturing the solders in the first place was a bad move on Iran’s part, there are around 10,000 British solders in Iraq (my guess?), not to mention 140,000+ U.S. soldiers who would certainly support them. Thus, starting any military conflict with Britain would be worse than with the United States, because if you fight with the US you are fighting them alone, but if you fight with Britain you also fight with the US and possibly more countries since international sentiment would be on the British side.

So my final thought on this is that either Khomeini and Ahmadinejad have nothing better to do in Tehran, or this is another act on Iran’s part to deflect attention away from its nuclear program (we saw this with Iran’s proxy war with Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel last summer). At any rate, Iran is growing less and less trustworthy by the day, and that does not show well for the future…