Earlier today...

I read about the release of those two Iranian saboteurs caught red-handed in Iraq. Here's the NY Slimes by way of Iran News and their take on the situation. A snippet:

"Under heavy American pressure, the Iraqi government ordered two Iranians who had been detained in an American military raid to leave the country, Iraqi officials said Friday, ending a bitter, nine-day political standoff. The detention brought the increasingly strained relationship between the Iraqis who run this country and their American backers to one of its lowest ebbs.

The Americans had insisted that the Iranians had been running guns and planning sectarian attacks and had pressed the Iraqis to expel them as intruders.

Iraqi officials said Friday that it was clear that the men, who were not publicly identified but were described as Iranian military officials by the Bush administration, had not been entirely forthcoming about what they were doing in Iraq. Even so, the Iraqis said they believed that the evidence against the men was mostly circumstantial and not as damning as the Americans had portrayed. For that reason, the Iraqis said, the government decided to release them..."

Unfortunately, I think this says it all about the situation and the implications are not good. Oh, and have I expressed my contempt for the diplomatic corps recently?:

"While the outcome was constructed to satisfy all sides, the episode, which began with an Iranian Embassy Mercedes being pulled over and led to a raid on the compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a powerful Shiite leader, deeply upset many Iraqi officials, who had been carefully building relations with Iran.

Mr. Zebari said that the men were visitors, not accredited diplomats as some officials had initially asserted, but that they had entered the country legally. It remained unclear on Friday night whether they had come at the invitation of Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani. A spokesman has said the invitation was been extended during a visit to Tehran by Mr. Talabani this month."

Oh, the Slimes makes me so sick. Their smug satisfaction at the fact that the US got out manuevered by Iran on this one practically oozes out of the screen:

"American officials have long asserted that Iran is sending weapons and money into Iraq to fuel violence here, but the episode last week was the first one in which they made such high-level arrests. A number of Iranians have been arrested here but most entered the country illegally and none had been directly tied to the government.

The American military did not publicly present the evidence it said was found in the raid. Some of it was believed to have included receipts for sniper rifles and sophisticated bombs as well as maps of Baghdad identifying neighborhoods as Sunni, Shiite or mixed — the primary preoccupation of militias in Iraq’s deepening sectarian war.

But the Iraqis said that the arrest had been more of a blunder and that if the suspected crimes had been serious, the Americans would never have released them."

On another note; there have been more bomb attacks in Bangkok, bringing the total bombings in the country today to eight.