Into Each Life, A Little Iranian Must Fall

Iran is playing games again, this time making grave pronouncements against five Britons caught "in Iranian waters" over the weekend.

Iran will take serious measures against five British yachtsmen detained in the Gulf if it proves they had "evil intentions," a close aide to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday.


Relations between Britain and Iran have been dogged by tension in recent years over a range of issues, from Tehran's nuclear program to Iranian allegations of British involvement in post-election violence in June this year.

Oil prices rose by more than $1 on fears of a diplomatic crisis after news of the detainment was made public on Monday.

"The judiciary will decide about the five ... naturally our measures will be hard and serious if we find out they had evil intentions," Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaie, the president's chief of staff, told the semi-official Fars news agency.

Britain stressed the five men were civilians and played down parallels with a 2007 incident when Iran seized eight British Royal Navy sailors and seven marines off its coast.

"There is certainly no question of any malicious intent on the part of these five young people," British Foreign Secretary David Miliband told BBC television. "This is a human story of five young yachtsmen. It's got nothing to do with politics, it's got nothing to do with nuclear enrichment programs."

I'm all for diplomacy, but this is just being unnecessarily obtuse and difficult.  Ahmadinejad has his little regime to prop up and anything he can do to take the people's minds off their own struggle for democracy in the country, well, he's going to take a whack at that pinata for sure.