Regardless of whether Iran was right or wrong to capture these sailors, it is quite obvious that the regime took a calculated risk in initiating this drama. The intention, in my opinion, was to achieve several objectives. First, one has to remember that United Nations Security Council Resolution 1747 was passed on March 24, tightening sanctions on Iran for its refusal to stop enriching uranium. Iran captured the sailors on March 23, just one day before. This suggests that Iran’s action was premeditated, to shift media attention and show the West what Iran was capable of doing if pushed into a corner.

The second objective stemmed from the U.S. drive to garner Arab support for its agenda in Iraq and the Middle East, and Condoleezza Rice’s success in building a block of Arab moderates against the rising power of anti-Israeli Iranian-led Shiites and their allied Arab hard-liners. By capturing the British sailors, Iran sought to send a message to its allies in the region and to the moderate Arab leaders alike that Iran is a major player with the power to upset the state of affairs in the region at will.

Another Iranian objective could have been to humiliate Tony Blair, knowing that with ongoing operations in Iraq and unfriendly relations with the Middle East broadly, he would be helpless to free the sailors. Iran might have also envisaged the possibility of bargaining the sailors against its citizens detained by the Americans in Iraq. The news that the Americans have allowed an Iranian diplomat to visit the imprisoned Iranians may indicate some success in achieving this goal. All in all, it seems that rightly or wrongly, Iran has achieved its short term objectives in capturing the British sailors and may have won applause from the Muslim world, which is frustrated with what they see as American colonialism.

Returning to the question of who runs Iran, many people may argue that Iran is run by a president democratically elected with 61.7 percent of his peoples’ votes (against George Bush’s 51 percent of the American popular vote in 2004, and his even more dubious election by the electoral college in 2000 while his opponent Al Gore actually won the popular vote). To raise the question of who runs Iran, therefore, goes against the grain of popular Middle East thinking and may appeal only to what the man on the street in Tehran sees as the American mentality of “my way or the highway.”

Another question that might equally bewilder the Iranian and Muslim people would be why America finds it so difficult to deal with the elected Iranian regime while it has no qualms about pampering and protecting dictatorial rulers of Pakistan, Egypt and other Arab despots. One could, however, see the ice-breaking visit of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Syria as a breath of fresh air in American diplomacy, heralding a new dawn for U.S realpolitik and a way forward to responsible American relations with other countries.