International Games

Forget the Superbowl, here's the latest on the biggest game in town -- the one between the Iran and the Britain. First of all the Iranians take fifteen members of the British armed forces captive and get away with it - goal! Then they score a political coup by suddenly letting them go - another goal!

And, believe it or not, now that the fifteen are safely home, the British government has just scored what we call in soccer an OWN goal - putting the ball into its own net -- and so that's three-nothing to the Ayatollahs. The whole affair has become a public relations disaster for the British, with the Prime Minister Tony Blair admitting that he had got it wrong, or rather that someone else had got it wrong, which is as about as close as any politician comes these days to saying sorry.

The homecoming of the fifteen went smoothly enough. And the press conference which followed was fine. And then Britain's Royal Navy, which once ruled the waves, decided to allow the fifteen captives to sell their stories to the media. Highest bidder takes all. Those in charge were determined to get maximum coverage to counteract Iran's version of events. Two of the hostages took the money.

The only woman, Faye Turney, was the hot property. There were exclusive TV and newspaper interviews, for which she was paid a rumored two hundred thousand dollars. But suddenly the public mood turned. Outrageous, screamed the editorials in the other newspapers. Profoundly damaging, raged the columnists. Were serving soldiers on the front line now to be allowed, even encouraged, to sell their stories to the papers? What had this done to the morale of the thousands of British soldiers risking their lives in Iraq & Afghanistan? And what about the families of those who had just lost their lives on these battlefields? They never got two hundred thousand dollars for THEIR stories.

So the government went into retreat. The Prime Minister decided it must not happen again. They had got it wrong. The man who used to run Mrs. Thatcher's PR thundered that spin had now brought the armed forces, just about the only institution in Britain that still works, to a new low.

And back in Iran, President Ahmadinejad is still smiling at how well it all seemed to work. His country broke every rule in the book, got away with it, and now it's the British government which is in trouble. And in the meantime, Iran is continuing to develop its nuclear program. The unfortunate lesson of the last two weeks is that the Iranians know they can tweak our noses -- and get away with it. This is Peter Allen for CBS News in London.

By Peter Allen