Cash for servicemen's stories

The Sunday Telegraph reports the views of an anonymous but well-placed source on the release of the British servicemen held by Iran:

A British Government official familiar with the negotiations said that while the abductions had provided Ahmadinejad with a platform from which to humiliate the West, such behaviour would have undermined Iran's ambitions for its nuclear programme. Countries which might otherwise have supported Iran would now be questioning whether a regime that took hostages could be trusted with sensitive nuclear technology.

"Ahmadinejad may have got some short-term PR bounce out of this, but the more cerebral members of the regime may be quite alarmed that they have squandered their perceived right to be treated as a country that should be trusted with a nuclear enrichment programme," he said. "In the long term, they may have lost out."

This has certainly been my reaction thus far. We got our people back while making no concessions to the mullahs and the messianic crank who serves as their puppet-president. The prospect of even dual-use technology, let alone the facilities for uranium enrichment, in the hands of a gangster regime ought by now to be worrying even fellow-gangster President Putin. I thought it likely that only the simple-minded would hail as an act of statesmanship and generosity Iran's release of people they had kidnapped in the first place, and so was unfazed when the first reaction of that constituency was to write to its house journal, the letters page of The Guardian, to say exactly that. But it has to be said that the behaviour of the British servicemen themselves is needlessly turning military failure into diplomatic disaster.

You can look back on what I have written here and in the press on this subject since the crisis broke, and you will find no criticism of the servicemen, whose abduction was a violation of international law and whose treatment by their Iranian captors was despicable. No one should fault them for stating obvious untruths under duress in the hope of gaining their liberty, in circumstances they were not trained to deal with. But however trying their experience at the time, these young men and one woman are not private citizens. They are members of HM forces. It would in any circumstances be difficult to gainsay the discomfort felt by my friend Bob Stewart, former commander of British forces in Bosnia, after the servicemen's release:

Although we are not at war and the system has obviously changed, I could still not understand our people stating categorically that they were in Iranian waters and apologising. I felt what they were saying was damaging. I will not condemn them for their behaviour but I found it very strange and it worried me. The men who apologised should not have done so. Some say no harm has been done by their actions. I disagree.

That point is only reinforced by the prospect of confessional accounts in the popular media. Having thanked their captors in a formulation apparently unforced and gratuitous, the servicemen would be better off saying nothing beyond the accounts they gave at their press conference of having been blindfolded, bound and held in isolation. What happens if they venture - whether solicited or not - political opinions that, as public servants, they have no right to make? It's an extraordinary decision by the MoD to give them permission to sell their stories. I'm less concerned at the potential loss of dignity to the armed forces, which the Shadow Foreign Secretary worries about, than I am at the possible propaganda value to Iran's rulers. How could we have got into this position when they were the ones who committed an act of lawless aggression and had to back down?

UPDATE: Bob Stewart comments further in The Times today (Monday):

I wish the sailor and Marine hostages nothing but the best and hope that they get as much money as possible. But the reputation of the Royal Navy and the British Armed Forces is going to suffer in the United States and around the world. In the international PR battle it is Iran nine out of ten and Britain two. That is the real cost of selling these stories.

I fear it is, and after - I repeat, because it's important - we got our people back while having made no concessions to Iran. I went on Sky News last Thursday evening to argue that any propaganda value for Iran from this affair was ephemeral, because their aggression and its failure had been patent. It appears I was too hopeful. The propaganda defeat is now being inflicted by our side, but on ourselves, through a crass decision by the MoD and the imprudent behaviour of the servicemen.