Iran's ploy buys time for weapons programme
By Tim Butcher, Middle East Correspondent
Iran's volte-face over the 15 sailors and Royal Marines may be a public relations ploy to buy time for its nuclear programme.
Ever since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president of Iran in the summer of 2005, his image overseas has grown steadily more negative. In the post-Saddam world, he has become for many western leaders "public enemy number one".
Defying the West over his country's nuclear programme, he has used numerous public speeches to call for Israel to be "wiped off the map".
And in one particularly portentous outbreak a year ago this week, he seemed to be referring to a nuclear attack on the Jewish state when he said Israel was "a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm".
It is hard to reconcile such an uncompromising image with the joshing figure broadcast on Iranian state television yesterday, looking more a benign godfather than sinister tyrant as he met the Britons.
Smiling and joking, President Ahmadinejad was 180 degrees different from the leader who stirred mobs, brandishing posters calling for the naval personnel to be executed, to attack the British embassy in Teheran just a few days earlier. The transformation was so glaring that it suggests he was involved more in a cynical ploy than a genuine change of heart.
The most likely explanation was that he deliberately sought to give the image of giving into British diplomatic pressure not just to improve his standing internationally but also to undercut the United States. Washington is known to be increasingly frustrated with Iran over its nuclear programme and its support of insurgents in Iraq which has had deadly consequences for some US personnel.
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1) Iran's ploy buys time for weapons programme
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