What exactly happened here?

So, my blood-thirsty “bomb the boats, feed the fish” ranting has been deflated by Iran forking over their British hostages with little further ado (other than some propaganda points for appearing to be in the driver’s seat) and making some conciliatory noises.

Before I flagellate myself excessively for over-reacting (not that I’ll do that anyway) let’s have a look at the big picture and see why all of this happened so relatively quickly. I cannot imagine that the same people who stage such a planned and co-ordinated operation would quit playing the game until they:

get what they wanted, or
have had their arms twisted pretty hard, if not in fact broken.

A lot has been said in the media about the increasing isolation of Iran on the world stage, and this whole episode did nothing to help them. There is the other possibility, that this was indeed a planned operation, but only at a certain level, and it was not in the “big picture” of the government in the first place. Add these two ingredients, stir, and you have the current outcome.

There are of course other possibilities. The Americans have a LOT of firepower in the area, and the Iranians have to know they’re just looking for an excuse to use it. This doesn’t need to be mentioned explicitly, but I for one am certain it played a role. The BBC today had this from Tony Blair:

The prime minister said the government had pursued a "dual-track strategy" of remaining open to dialogue with Iran, while "mobilising international support and pressure".
"In my view it would be utterly naive to believe that our personnel would have been released unless both elements of the strategy had been present."

It has to be taken into account that whatever I say is limited to what I know, or can logically infer from what I know. I maintain that the British military and government did NOT project very well out of this whole thing. Whether they have (re) learned anything from this remains to be seen, and will be shown by the reactions of their troops the next time somebody tries a stunt like this.

In a straight-up fight the Brits can’t take on the Iranians in the latter’s backyard, but they should be able to win any skirmish, and with the help of their allies (read: the USA) lay a serious hurt on something the Iranian government would value.

The bottom line, my war mongering ranting aside, is that we, the West, cannot afford to look weak. We are not, on paper, but that changes if we aren’t prepared to use what we have. The Brits lost MAJOR face on this one according to me, and I’m as big a supporter of them as you’re going to find outside of the UK. Bigger than a lot of people within it as well, I might add…
So, if I think they came out of this looking bad (though the “rapid” resolution mitigates that somewhat), what does our opposition, and more importantly, those sitting on the fence, think? Nothing favourable, and I’ll stand by that statement too.