Iran's decision to release the 15 British Navy personnel it captured last month was a tribute to good sense on its part and skillful negotiating on the British side.

Iran probably came out a net winner, even though the United Kingdom never acknowledged -- in public, anyway -- that its sailors had been in Iranian waters. Iran's president, the sometimes inflammatory Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, showed himself at his best and worst. At the end of a ceremony Wednesday in which he was pinning medals on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who had bagged the British, he announced that Iran was letting the prisoners go, as an Easter gift to the British people.

Good theater on his part -- should he now be called the Big Bunny? But Iran had made its point. Not only was it prepared to confront the United Kingdom and the United States while they were carrying out a naval exercise in the Persian Gulf, it released the prisoners only when it chose -- after 12 days of captivity -- and in a gesture clearly directed at the British people, as opposed to the U.K. government.

British handling of the embarrassing affair showed considerable negotiating skill. Her Majesty's Government stuck to its guns in not agreeing to state that it had been violating murky, disputed Iranian territorial waters. British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett made a very important move in stating publicly Tuesday that military force was ruled out in resolving the issue, even though there were substantial British and American forces in the Persian Gulf at the time. The confessions of some of the 15 and the donning of an Islamic head scarf by Leading Seaman Faye Turney made the British position harder to defend and must have made some stiff upper lips quiver.

The British also must be given credit for having prevented President Bush from making their negotiating task more difficult by his administration's customary threats of military action against Iran.

All in all, this matter has ended reasonably well, considering the alternatives. It stands in contrast to the 444 days that the American embassy hostages were held in Tehran in 1979-81, a time that included a failed U.S. attempt to free them by military means, as opposed to negotiations.