But that wasn't the case last week in Riyadh, where what Saudi Arabian King Abdullah had to say to his "honorable brothers" sounded more like a lecture to the entire Middle East. "In wounded Palestine, the mighty people suffer from oppression and occupation," the monarch said. "In beloved Iraq, blood is flowing between brothers, in the shadow of an illegitimate foreign occupation, and abhorrent sectarianism threatens a civil war. Lebanon is virtually paralyzed. In Sudan the weakness of the Arabs has led to foreign intervention, and in Somalia one civil war is ending, but only so that the next one can begin."

Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora began to nod, and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani stopped eating chocolates. Even Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's rigid pharaoh-like face suddenly perked up.

DER SPIEGEL

Who pulls the strings in Iran

But hardly anyone outside Riyadh was paying attention to the summit, overshadowed as it was by yet another crisis in the Gulf, when Iranian Revolutionary Guards detained 15 British sailors in the waters off the mouth of the Shat al-Arab River. According to the Iranians, the troops of the British Crown, who had been deployed to protect Iraq's terminals, were apprehended in Iraqi waters.

Gradual escalation

Like the screenplay of some political thriller, the conflict gradually escalated. On Wednesday Iran aired images of the British sailors eating a meal, with female sailor Faye Turney in the foreground. On Thursday London appealed to the U.N. Security Council. Instead, it expressed "grave concern." British Prime Minister Tony Blair was quick to register his "disgust" with the Iranians' parading of his country's sailors on television. He had frozen his government's relations with Tehran the day before.

On Sunday about 200 Iranian students threw firecrackers and bricks into the British embassy compound. On Monday Iranian television showed fresh footage of the naval personnel, saying they had all admitted to entering Iran illegally. But Tehran's tone appeared to soften as Iranian television said it had detected a shift in British policy that chould help resolve the crisis.

Ali Larijani, the Iranian national security advisor, criticized London's alarmism and called it "stupid and misplaced" -- as if hostage taking hasn't already been a hallmark of Tehran's foreign policy for decades. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad demanded an "apology." London, for its part, threatened Iran with more than just diplomatic action if it did not promptly release the British hostages. The markets, the most important seismograph when it comes to earthquakes on the international political front, reacted immediately, and the oil price began creeping back up to the $70 level.

In the past this would have been enough to start a war, with one power provoking and another being forced to take action -- if only to avoid losing face. In the last century, the game the Iranians were playing with the British at the mouth of the Shat al-Arab would have been a classic maneuver designed to produce one outcome: war.

But things are different today, and now the question is whether the case of the 15 British sailors can be negotiated away as a border dispute between two medium-sized powers.

Or has the underlying conflict -- the West's fear of Iran's nuclear program -- already gone too far for moderates on both sides to be able to prevent escalation?

The diplomatic struggle began at the Riyadh summit. In addition to the 22 Arab heads of state, King Abdullah had invited four other prominent statesmen to Riyadh: Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.

Mottaki in particular was urged to ease the situation. Erdogan asked him to at least allow the Turks consular access to the captured sailors. Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari insisted that the British patrol boats had never left Iraqi waters. The Saudis and Ban Ki-Moon also tried to change Mottaki's mind, but their efforts have been unsuccessful so far.

"Ominous confrontation" taking shape

"The Middle East," Ban Ki-Moon told the Arab leaders, "is more complex, more fragile and more dangerous than it has been for a very long time." Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf warned: "tensions in the Gulf region are shaping an ominous confrontation that could have incalculable consequences globally, regionally and among the Muslim Umma (faithful)."

The impasse comes at a time when it seemed that the adversaries in the region were on the verge of giving diplomacy a chance. The United States and Iran had declared their willingness to join other neighbors in an effort to negotiate a solution to the mess in Iraq. A preparatory meeting of ambassadors in Baghdad in early March is to be followed by a mid-April conference at the ministerial level in either Istanbul or Kuwait. That meeting could signal the beginning of a negotiating marathon that could end -- as it did in the cases of Libya and North Korea -- in a major settlement.

REUTERS

Anti-riot police sit under the score board during a soccer match between Esteghlal and Perspolisat at the Azadi stadium in Tehran March 30, 2007.

The White House has been deliberately sending out targeted pinpricks designed to unsettle the leadership in Tehran. "The Iranians have a belligerent, loud and dangerous government that is seeking confrontation with the rest of the world," US President George W. Bush said in February, commenting on the men working for his adversary, Ahmadinejad. "Our goal is to keep up the pressure so that reasonable people can come to the fore." The threats were followed by a military buildup in the Gulf and US troops taking aggressive action against Iranians in Iraq.

US Special Forces units hunted down Iranian Revolutionary Guards who had infiltrated Iraq. The Americans believe that these units are in Iraq for the sole purpose of training Shiite death squads. Dozens of Iranians were arrested, and five are still in detention today.

Some of the Iranians arrested in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil are said to be high-ranking members of the Revolutionary Guards, including General Mohammad Djafari Sahraroudi, a man who is wanted by Interpol for his role in the murder of Iranian Kurd dissidents in Vienna in 1989.

Spy games

Tehran also feels threatened by the disappearance of Ali Reza Asgari, a former deputy defense minister and general in the Revolutionary Guards. The Iranian leadership claims that Asgari, who was last seen in Istanbul in December, was kidnapped, and it suspects the United States. There are persistent rumors that he is in US custody, where he is being interrogated. Robert Baer, a former CIA agent, speculates that Asgari could be helping the Americans develop proof of the Revolutionary Guards' involvement in terrorist activities, proof, says Baer, "that could be used to justify a war with Iran."

The Iranians are fighting back with barbs of their own, also intended to unsettle their adversaries, from Iran's reported efforts to capture American and Israeli spies to the Tehran government's claims that the Americans and British are behind attacks in southern Iran.

Despite CIA Director Michael Hayden's early warnings to the White House about the possibility of a dangerous escalation of the US's conflict with Iran, Bush opted for intimidation tactics. According to Vali Nasr, an Iranian-born political science professor and one of the foremost experts on Iran in the United States, the CIA believed it was winning the intimidation game, "but now the Iranians have shown that they can play the same game."

After the arrests in Arbil, Tehran's leadership used the Revolutionary Guards' weekly newspaper, Subhi Sadek, to threaten countermeasures. In retaliation, the paper wrote, the Revolutionary Guards, or Pasdaran, could "capture a nice bunch of blue-eyed blond-haired officers and feed them to our fighting cocks." Those officers, as it has now turned out, are British.

Powerful Pasdaran

Tehran's Supreme Defense Council met in mid-March, apparently in response to pressure from the Pasdaran. The commander of the group's elite force, the Al-Quds Brigade, is said to have insisted that the Iranian leadership not take the Arbil arrests lying down. Given the Pasdaran's importance within the Tehran power structure, it was a demand the regime could not simply ignore.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the man behind the revolution that led to the Shah's ouster, established the Pasdaran because he distrusted the police and the regular army. The members of the Pasdaran were loyal followers of Khomeini, legendary for their fanaticism and willingness to make sacrifices.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former member the Al-Quds Brigade, has since made a career for himself in politics. Since the former Revolutionary Guard became president, the Pasdaran's force of 125,000 is widely seen as the fanatical leader's private army.

The Revolutionary Guards are said to have established their own shadow realm in the Shat al-Arab region. Disappointed over the poor salaries they continue to earn despite their contributions to the revolution, while the Tehran mullahs have enriched themselves, many Pasdaran are said to have entered the smuggling business to bolster their incomes. In their eyes, the abduction of the British sailors is fair retribution for tightened ship inspections on the Shat al-Arab that get in the way of the Pasdaran's profitable black-market trade in automobiles destined for Iraq.

The link between foreign policy and criminal acts such as kidnapping and blackmail is well established in Iran. It was most clearly demonstrated in the Iran hostage crisis, in which 52 American citizens were held hostage for 444 days after the storming of the US Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979.

In that crisis, the Iranians paraded their bound and blindfolded prisoners before the world press to humiliate the United States, which they dubbed the "Great Satan," and demanded billions in US dollars in return for the release of the hostages.

In the end US President Jimmy Carter, humiliated and eventually voted out of office, had to pay a steep political and financial price for the release of the hostages: more than $10 billion from frozen Iranian bank accounts. But Carter was no longer president by the time the hostages were finally released. Only after his successor, Ronald Reagan, had taken the oath of office on Jan. 20, 1981 did Algerian aircraft take off from Tehran's Mehrabad Airport with the American hostages on board.

German victims

The case of German citizen and Hamburg native Helmut Hofer, now 65, was less spectacular. Hofer, a businessman, had been a dealer in rare auto parts, pistachios and leather goods in Iran until he was arrested by the regime's henchmen in September 1997, allegedly for having sexual relations with a 27-year-old female Iranian student.

It was a classic intelligence operation. To this day Hofer is not the only one who is convinced that revolutionary zealots from the judicial and intelligence community used him as a bargaining chip to apply pressure to the German government in the so-called "Mykonos" affair.

The Tehran regime had come under fire internationally for its alleged involvement in the assassination of four Iranian Kurdish dissidents at the Greek restaurant "Mykonos" in Berlin in 1992. In the ensuing court case, German prosecutors accused the mullahs of terrorism and provided proof of ties between the attackers and senior government officials in Tehran.

Hofer was arrested in Tehran nine months later, a move German intelligence officials now believe was an act of revenge. It took 18 months before an Iranian appeals court overturned the death sentence against the German businessman -- probably in return for Germany's agreement to revive trade relations with Tehran.

Another German went through a similar ordeal recently. Like the 15 British sailors, Donald Klein, a 53-year-old stonemason and amateur fisherman from central western Germany, ventured too close to Iranian waters in late 2005. The Pasdaran arrested Klein and his French skipper, who were only interested in fishing. Klein was not released until more than a year later.

Klein, like Hofer, also became a pawn in a political game. The intelligence community in Tehran wanted to tie his case to the fate of Iranian Kazem Darabi, who is serving a life sentence in Germany for the attack on the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin.

Tehran's hostage bazaar

It is difficult to tell who pulls the strings, who provides the goods and who sets the prices in Tehran's hostage bazaar. There are many competing groups in Tehran, from the secular to the religious, from pragmatists to hardliners. Whether cases like Hofer's or Klein's -- and the current hostage crisis between London and Tehran -- can be brought to a speedy end or will lead to a months-long tug-of-war depends on who ultimately prevails in the theocracy's opaque power structure.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair ought to have no trouble gaining allies against a country under as much international pressure as Iran and securing the prompt release of the prisoners. But this isn't the case, because the simple question the British face from enemies and, indirectly, from friends is this: Why exactly are you in the Gulf region in the first place?

Like an evil curse, the war George W. Bush and Blair launched against Iraq is heightening tensions throughout the region with each month that passes. Knowing that most countries question the legitimacy of the Western presence, Ahmadinejad can take full advantage of the crisis. That starts with no longer having to pay serious attention to threats from Bush or Blair, leaders generally regarded as too weak to engage in another showdown.

Under these circumstances, it was to be expected that Blair and Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett believed, in the first days after the kidnapping incident, that bilateral contacts would be the best way to gain the prisoners' release. "Softly, softly" was Whitehall's initial approach to the matter.

But by Tuesday, the fifth day of the hostage crisis, the climate at home in Britain had changed. The London Times clamored over the "pusillanimous timidity of British officials and politicians, who have failed disgracefully to confront Iran with the ultimatum this flagrant aggression demands."

Pressure on Blair

Blair was in a tight spot. He had warned the Iranians against parading their hostages on TV, as they had done in a comparable case in 2004, but his warning merely encourage the Iranians to do just that. They released a video of the hostages eating and published a letter written by one of the sailors, Faye Turney, who admitted -- voluntarily or not -- that she and her fellow sailors had "apparently gone into Iranian waters."

On Friday footage of another sailor, Nathan Thomas Summers, was aired in which he said he wanted to "apologize" to the Iranian people. In a second letter, this one addressed to the British people, Turney purportedly wrote -- reflecting the style of Tehran's propaganda -- that she had been sacrificed due to the intervening policies of the Bush and Blair governments."

By then the time to err on the side of caution had ended, at least for the British. London asked its European friends for their support, asked its Middle Eastern partners to mediate and even appealed to pro-Iranian groups Hezbollah and Hamas for their help. When the British asked the UN Security Council to condemn the kidnappings they were dealt their first painful defeat in the current crisis. Instead of complying with the British request, the Security Council merely voiced its "deep concern" over the affair. Russia, a veto power, suggested that the two parties to the conflict return to bilateral negotiations.

Nevertheless, at a meeting last Friday in Bremen, which had actually been convened to discuss tentative signs of improvement in the Middle East conflict, the EU foreign ministers lent their support to London and asked their chief diplomat Javier Solana to appeal to the Iranian president. However, no one in Bremen mentioned anything about other EU countries following in Britain's footsteps and putting their relations with Iran on ice until the prisoners are released.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan