Iran's President Retakes Spotlight

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks to the media during his press conference in Tehran, Iran, Wednesday, April 4, 2007. Iran on Wednesday freed the 15 detained British sailors and marines in what President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called an Easter gift to the British people. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi) (Vahid Salemi - AP)

-- With the announcement that 15 Britons were going free, Iran's hardline president retook his favorite spot on the international stage _ delighting in Tehran's rising power and lecturing Western powers on their misdeeds.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad kept an unusually low profile for most of the international standoff, prompting speculation that he had been sidelined by more pragmatic figures in Iran's government, whose ultimate authority is supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

But if the declaration that the sailors and marines were being released after 13 days _ with no public apology from the British _ was a defeat for Ahmadinejad's usually confrontational approach, he wasn't showing it Wednesday.

Instead, the former Tehran mayor beamed before the TV cameras as he greeted the sailors and marines at the presidential palace, accepting apologies for their purported intrusion into Iranian waters.

Throughout his performance, Ahmadinejad seemed to revel in the world's attention, reaching out to key constituencies at home and abroad before springing the surprise announcement that the Britons would be freed.

At a two-hour press conference, he detailed decades of British and American interference in Iran and the region, a theme that resonates even among domestic reformists and moderates who have increasingly criticized his in-your-face foreign policy and management of Iran's struggling economy.

The president also paid homage to Iran's Revolutionary Guards, the elite corps that is a bulwark of hardline power in the country and a pillar of support for Ahmadinejad, a former Guards commander.

Perhaps trying to ease the sting of the Britons' release, Ahmadinejad pinned a medal to the chest of the Revolutionary Guards' commander whose men seized the Britons on March 23 in the northern Persian Gulf. Ahmadinejad said the British government had sent a letter to the Iranian Foreign Ministry pledging that entering Iranian waters "will not happen again."

In a nod to social conservatives, Ahmadinejad told off Britain for sending sailor Faye Turney, who has a young daughter, to patrol the Persian Gulf, asking, "Why don't they respect family values in the West?"

Then the president cast himself as a benevolent leader, stepping past the dispute between governments to offer the sailors freedom, he said, in the spirit of the Prophet Muhammad's birthday and the Easter season.

"This pardon is a gift to the British people," he said.