Wide of the mark

In fact, the EU and individual European governments were helpful and supportive, as also was the UN.

There is some evidence to suggest that the US government kept a low profile because it was asked to, to avoid inflaming an already volatile situation.

We can all be very pleased and relieved that the sailors and marines were released as swiftly and with as little harm as they were.

I am grateful that in my 58 years I have never found myself in the situation in which they were placed and I have no wish to minimise the fear and sense of isolation they must have felt during their days in captivity.

Yet across the Middle East, ordinary people, I am sure, will not be able to avoid the comparison with the inmates in America's Gulag in Guantanamo Bay.

They will wonder, as these sailors and marines did not spend years in isolation in orange jump suits, undergoing psychological and sometimes physical torture with no end in sight, what all the fuss was about.

Meanwhile, in Iran itself, I am afraid that Britain is remembered by both supporters and opponents of the present government there as the organiser, with American help, of the overthrow of the democratically elected, secular government of Muhammad Mossadeq in 1953, because of its intention to nationalise the country's oil reserves against the wishes of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

They will also remember that the British Government in the 1980s was supportive of the war waged against Iran for ten years by one Saddam Hussein.

Christopher Walker-Lyne, Millfield Road, York.