The Latest from Iran (13 July): Challenge Renewed

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Over the last two years, we paid a good deal of attention to the story of five Iranian officials seized in March 2007 by US forces in Erbil in northern Iraq. It is a measure of how far the world has moved away from the Iraq story, and indeed of how much internal developments in Iran have come to the fore, that the release of the five by the Americans last week received so little attention (apart from Iranian state media, which eagerly featured the return of the men, pictured at left, this weekend).

That’s a mistake because this complex tale leaves two long-lasting lessons. The first is that, despite the tensions of Iran’s post-election crisis, there are officials in the Obama Administration who want to remove obstacles to long-term negotiations. The second is even more important: as Gareth Porter outlines below in a story for Inter Press Service, the release of the five Iranians points to the emergence of an Iraqi Government that is no longer subject to the demands of the US military:

Behind Detainee Release, a US-Iraqi Conflict on Iran

WASHINGTON – The release Friday of five Iranians held by the U.S. military in Iraq for two and a half years highlights the long-simmering conflict between the U.S. and Iraqi views of Iranian policy in Iraq and of the role of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) there.
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Tags: David Petraeus, David Satterfield, Gareth Porter, Hoshyar Zebari, Ian Kelly, Inter Press Service, Iran, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Jalal Talebani, Mahdi Army, Mahmoud Farhadi, Moqtada al-Sadr, Nouri al-Maliki, Obama Administration, Qassem Suleimani, Quds Force, Scott Peterson