Interesting that Tony Blair said yesterday that the next 48 hours would be critical regarding the British hostages:

Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday that he was still hoping to secure the release of the 15 British sailors and marines captured by Iran through diplomatic means.

Blair added that the next 48 hours would be "fairly critical" in resolving the dispute.

And just like that the hostages are released:

Fifteen British military personnel are to be freed by Iran on Thursday after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he would forgive them despite Britain’s failure to acknowledge they had strayed into Iranian territory.

Ahmadinejad told a news conference broadcast round the world on Wednesday Britain was not "brave enough" to admit it had made a mistake in the standoff, which began when Tehran seized the 15 in the Shatt al-Arab waterway between Iraq and Iran on March 23.

The Counterterrorism Blog believes that the reason for the release is that Iran had realized what a mistake they had made in trying to divert attention away from their other problems:

Simply because the basis behind this punctual operation was systematically eroded in one week: Analysis exposing the role of the Iranian intelligence in Iraq, the defection of Iranian military officials, and the rise of protests inside the country explained what was the regime trying to dodge. The surfacing of this analysis both in Western and Arab media stripped the Iranian PR machine from its “juice.” Few around the world still believed that the Mullahs were concerned about a British breach of Iranian waters. It was all about “creating” an international incident to flee the above realities. Hence the “Psy-ops” architects quickly ordered a change in direction.

While Hot Air believes there was some quid pro quo going on:

Iranian state media reported Wednesday that an Iranian envoy will be allowed to meet the five Iranians detained in January by U.S. forces in the northern Iraqi town of Irbil. …

"A representative from the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad will meet" the detained Iranians, the official Islamic Republic News Agency said.

U.S. troops detained the five Iranians when it raided their office in Irbil, the capital of the Kurdish autonomous zone, on Jan 11. The troops also confiscated computers and documents.

But I tend to believe Timmerman’s take on this since it appears he has an excellent source inside Iran:

The order to capture the British sailors and marines was given by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself, NewsMax sources believe.

Khamenei’s top advisers argued that by striking out against a U.S. ally in Iraq, they would be sending a message to other European nations to step back from supporting the U.S. strategy of increasing pressure on Iran over its nuclear program. They saw the move as a clear test of Western resolve.

But as Britain refused to apologize for the behavior of its boarding party, continuing to insist that they were operating in Iraqi waters – not inside Iran’s territorial waters, as Tehran alleged – some of Khamenei’s advisers began to have second thoughts.

Adding to those doubts were reports that the USS Nimitz was steaming toward the Persian Gulf – making it the third Carrier Strike Group in the area.

The Nimitz is expected to join the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and the USS John C. Stennis, both currently in the Persian Gulf, in the coming weeks.

On Friday, March 30, Khamenei’s top advisers met in an emergency session of the Supreme Council on National Security, chaired by Ali Larijani. Larijani is the regime’s top nuclear negotiator, and is a confidant of the Supreme Leader, while maintaining close ties to President Ahmadinejad.

At that meeting, Revolutionary Guards commander Maj. Gen. Rahim Safavi reported that the deployment of the Nimitz suggested that a U.S. military invasion of Iran was being prepared for early May. He urged the Council to order the release of the British hostages as a gesture to defuse the tension in the region.

The next day, however, the head of the Political and Cultural bureau of the Revolutionary Guards, Dr. Yadollah Javani, called Safavi a "traitor" for proposing the release of the hostages.

[...]The first inkling that the faction urging release of the hostages was winning appeared on Tuesday evening, when the influential Baztab Web site, run by former Revolutionary Guards commander Gen. Mohsen Rezai, reported that the British captives would soon be released.

"It can now be said that the politicians who are for continuing relations with London have got the upper hand," Baztab reported. Fars News Agency also reported on Tuesday that a prominent cleric, Hojatt-ol eslam Ghorbanali Najafabadi, was urging the public prosecutor not to pursue a legal case against the British sailors, but to solve the hostage crisis "through international diplomatic channels."

For now, Tehran’s leaders have backed down. Why? My bets are on the Nimitz.

Either way, Iran has backed down and used every waking hour to PR the hell out of the release as chronicled by Gateway Pundit.  How disgusting are these photo’s?

Oh yeah, they are just so happy they were taken hostages…those Iranians are such nice sweet guys.  Look at my new suit guys!  How swell…..

Geez.

UPDATE

Little off the topic of the hostages but still on Iran, check out the speech given by the former Shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi, this week at the Hudson Institute:

The latest Presidential National Security Directive names the Islamic Republic of Iran as the greatest threat to international peace, security and stability. That is principally because permitting the foremost state-sponsor of terrorism to acquire nuclear weapons is unthinkable.

What has changed from Herman Kahn’s era is that mutual assured destruction (MAD) worked against a rival that defined its interests in this material world. Messrs. Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and many of their cohorts do not.

How can assured destruction deter those who glorify self-destruction and call it martyrdom? Just as suicide bombing has changed domestic security policies, dealing with the nuclearization of this new kind of “other-worldly” state requires a different approach in international relations. Far from acting to avoid assured destruction, they invite it with tireless exaltation of martyrdom! Which brings us to the question, what could be done?

The current debate on Iran seems to have reduced the question to a choice between regime change and behavior change. That is a false choice. It is also a formulation preferred by those who do not mind loading the dice in favor of longer life for Iran’s clerical regime. This is because short memories equate regime change with the use of force in Iraq. The unique mistakes in Iraq, however, should not sully regime change, which wasn’t such a bad phrase during the Cold War era, just two decades ago:

President Reagan knew that he would not get behavior change from the Soviet regime unless he seemed serious about changing it. The actual change was a happy byproduct, which spelled the end of the Marxist mystique. East-European youth backpacked their way to the West to tell fellow students about the wide chasm between the deceptive promise of Marxism and its wretched reality. Long lines to take Marxist courses disappeared in Universities, from Buenos Aires to Paris.

Similarly, I am convinced once the people bring down the clerical regime, with Iranian journalists, intellectuals and students free to travel, they will have the same shattering impact on the appeal of Islamist theocracy throughout the Moslem world…

…Still, it was easier to talk favorably about regime change in 2004 or 2005, when Iraqis were celebrating free elections and the Cedar Revolution was gaining steam in Lebanon. That is when Tehran’s theocrats and Syria’s Assad sensed the danger and set out to kill the hope for democracy in the region. They exploited religious and ethnic divisions to create a quagmire as a no-trespass sign to the rest of the world: Shelve any plans for democracy in the region, from the subcontinent to the Mediterranean, and from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf – read the sign.

The Baker-Hamilton Report is a tacit acceptance of that no-trespass sign. Unfortunately, the report does not indicate how one can reach an agreement with the Islamic Republic, whose primary purpose is to humiliate the US in the theater of the Moslem world…

Other’s Blogging:

• In The Bullpen
• The Coalition of the Swilling
• Sister Toldjah
• Captain’s Quarters
• Hot Air
• Israpundit