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Sat 03 Mar 2007Iran needs to rethink tacticsIran needs friends these days, badly. For months a fierce debate has raged in the international community about engaging with Tehran over Iraq and about how to prevail on it to curtail its nuclear weapons programme. Only days ago the US made a major concession in agreeing to meet the Iranians in the context of a regional conference on the stabilisation of Iraq. Which makes all the more extraordinary the hamfisted diplomacy Iran has manifested following the arrest last week by it of 15 British marines and sailors in the Shatt al-Arab waterway.Yesterday Tehran paraded on TV a prisoner's "confession" and apology to the Iraqi people and issued the third of a series of letters purportedly written freely by the captured British sailor Faye Turney which says she was "sacrificed due to the intervening policies of the Bush and Blair governments". She continues in a similarly improbable pidgin-English, in a style reminiscent of the 1930s Moscow trials, concluding: "It is now our time to ask our government to make a change to its oppressive behaviour towards other people". The plausibility of Iran's case has certainly not been helped by such crude propaganda, nor by the fact that it has offered two conflicting versions of where the arrests took place.