Loss of Face

The news of the release of the 15 service people by the Iranians is good news for their personal safety but the incident is a complete disaster for British prestige. The only winner is Iran's hurdling president, Nahmound Ahmadinejad who clearly organised the kidnappings and then made a present of returning our serves men back to ''the British people'' showing what a nice chap he is!

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From the details now available it is clear that from the beginning of the kidnapping incident the handling of events by all concerned on the British side has given a PR victory to the Iranian government and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in particular.

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One aspect is particularly concerning being the apparent overwillingness of the captured 15 servicemen to give statements to the media. Captured servicemen in the past have said in forced statements '' we have been asked to apolgise for...'' rather that the to keen to please statements backed up with smiles and waves given by the Royal Marines and Saliors. It is not only British dignaty that suffered during the past fourteen days but also the dignity of two junior officers and their charge of 12 men and one woman.

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We learn from the BBC's Radio 4 World Tonight programme that, contrary to expectations, there is going to be no formal Board of Inquiry into the events surrounding the Iranian hostage incident. This is from Paul Adams, the BBC's defence correspondent, who reports that the Navy is instead to carry out a wide-ranging "lessons learned process".

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There was a time when following incidents like this the media would call for the resignation of ministers and senior Officers in the Armed Services. However and sadly in today's world the matter has become a ''happy fluffy bunny story''.

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Meanwile rejoicing in Basra after a roadside bomb killed four British service personnel and their interpreter, and seriously injured another soldier. Two of the dead were women, from the Intelligence Corps and the Royal Army Medical Corps. The two male soldiers were from the Royal Army Medical Corps and 2nd Battalion The Duke of Lancaster's Regiment. Pictures of the scene (above) show locals cheering and rejoicing, parading with a soldier's helmet and fragments of the Warrior, in Hayaniya, a slum area on the northwestern outskirts of Basra - known as a stronghold of local (Iranian-backed) Shia militias.

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According to a more detailed report in The Times the personnel died when a convoy of armoured vehicles was attacked by two devices last night. The patrol then came under attack from small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades.Witnesses tell of the British patrol having repulsed an earlier ambush by five insurgents in a different district of the city, wounding one of the attackers. During the second ambush, British forces returned fire while trying to evacuate the wounded. Photographs of the scene showed a large crater in the road that was at least a three feet deep and several yards wide. Iraqi children (and adults) were taking away pieces of burned wreckage. The Times (and others) also report than, after the attack, a British patrol was seen storming an Iraqi checkpoint close to the scene of and disarming the police there.

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This now brings to six the number of British soldiers killed in Basra since Sunday, making it, as the paper observes, one of the deadliest weeks of the Iraq war for UK forces. No commentators are making any link between the bomb incident and the Royal Navy hostages, but the loss of face embodied in the humiliating capture of the British personnel and their subsequent behaviour can only have emboldened attackers, who could see for themselves the weakness of British forces.

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Appeasement brings its own penalties and, in the greater scheme of things, no one can argue that the events of the last 14 days have in any way improved the prestige of British forces, where winning the respect of the local populace is a vital precursor to dealing successfully with an insurgency.