What was Iran doing kidnapping the 15 British military people?

I couldn't see any reasonable international goal for Iran that could have been achieved by kidnapping the 15 British military people, and the sudden return of them for no apparent gain strengthened my feeling. But I know very little about Iran, so it was just a feeling that something was being played out that I couldn't see.

Fortunately, Steve Clemons has provided an explanation that makes sense to me. Here is the core part of what he wrote:

I'm of the school -- though only speculating -- that the Supreme Leader did not authorize the capture of the British military unit. But there are others who tell me that there is no way that such an action would take place without the Supreme Leader's full support and approval. At this point, many tell me we will never know whether there was a gap or not between Iran's chief Ayatollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that took this action.

If a gap were acknowledged, such information could destabilize Iran on many levels. I think that there was a gap. The more I learn about Iran's power structures and political contours, the more I believe that the arrest of the British soldiers was designed to warn the Supreme Leader Khamenei and other political nodes in Iran that the Revolutionary Guard cannot be pushed, constrained, mismanaged, embarrassed, or forced to accept an acquiescent position on its own nuclear pretensions.

I think that the Revolutionary Guard took action first to warn other parts of Iran's political order that it could provoke war whenever it wanted. I think too that the Revolutionary Guard was probably not instructed by Khamenei to conduct the arrest of these soldiers -- though I respect those who see this differently. It's simply too irrational a move for the Supreme Leader to have taken.

This is just to core of what he wrote. I suggest reading the rest of Steve's article for the context.

This makes a lot more sense to me than does looking at the kidnapping as a message to America or other powers outside Iran. It looks like it was a power move between the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRG)and the Mullahs who run the country. If the Mullahs were getting ready to negotiate the nuclear development with the UN, this was a statement by the IRG that they will severely damage Iran internationally before giving up their efforts to develop nukes. If this is the case, then the sudden reversal and return of the 15 British was an additional statement (by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who came out of the IRG) that he could be dealt with by the Mullahs, but they were not going to run roughshod over the IRG. So what we watched was internal Iranian politics being played out in the Persian Gulf.

The real problem I see now is that Dick Cheney and the NeoCons will not accept that explanation. It won't suit them, because it means that they and America generally were totally irrelevant to the whole drama except as spectators. Cheney and the NeoCons are going to believe that it was all played out to send THEM a message, because no one and nothing else besides the big, bad Americans led by Cheney and the NeoCons could possibly be of any importance to the Iranians. Besides, Cheney and the NeoCons take a very simplified view of nations. When a nation takes international actions, those actions must have been approved by the government. There are no sub-governmental units which can act unilaterally without the blessing of the governmental leaders. [That is their complaint with Nancy Pelosi talking to the Syrians, for example.)

So if Cheney and the NeoCons don't believe in an Iranian internal politics explanation for the kidnapping of the 15 British military people, the question is going to be what the Americans can do to Iran because of the kidnapping. Iran will have to be punished for what they did. Since it will be based on assumptions having little or no connection to reality, once again we will see Cheney and the NeoCons prove their utter incompetence at running government.

Let's hope Cheney and the NeoCons aren't allowed to do anything as stupid as they usually do. We really won't like the results if they slip the leash.