This state of affairs may reflect a change of US policy, and not that of Iran.
Perhaps 300 is “a record number of prisoners” (my italics) and the reason “Virtually all were captured in the past two months” is because the other, previously-captured Iran-linked operatives were released – so there was no accumulation.
That would be of a piece with the mass releases of many thousands of insurgents and terrorists inside Iraq and hundreds more from Gitmo. Those people returned to fight against and kill our troops, yet the Bush administration continued the practice as part of its self-defeating War Lite.
Here’s a bit of what F. J. Bing West, former assistant secretary of defense, and currently a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, recently said on the topic (PDF file):
Iraq is holding fewer prisoners than Saddam released in late 2002, when he opened the jail gates and let loose tens of thousands of criminals that society had incarcerated over the decades. today, eight out of ten detainees walk free-and they are paid $6 a day for their inconvenience.
…The reason we are not affecting the enemy is because we let him go. “catch and release program” is frustrating to American and Iraqi Soldiers in Iraq; the farcical “rule of law” aids and abets the insurgents and death squads. This war is going to drag on unnecessarily because our senior commanders, military and civilian, do not understand that the war effort is being systematically undercut by not arresting and imprisoning insurgents and death squad members for the duration of the conflict.
The greatest single defect-and it may be mortal-in the effort to restore stability is the refusal of the Iraqi and American systems to imprison the criminals, insurgents, and death squad members.
…So how do we prevail? We don’t.
This has been going on for years, and reflects the White House policy of making political negatives disappear through sleight-of-hand, outreach and “negotiations,” of the sort that blessed us with Iran/al Sadr’s empire encompassing all of southern Iraq.
