As a result, many Iranian officials are convinced that the U.S. remains committed to "regime change" and plans to bomb Iran.
"You can't divorce [the detention of the Britons] from all the saber-rattling against Iran," said Kaveh Afrasiabi, a former political science professor at the University of Tehran now based in Cambridge, Mass. "There's a concern of a U.S.-British concert to control the Persian Gulf waterways."
But instead of being cowed by the West's superior military power, Iran sought ways to step up its own pressure.
"Because the U.S. military configurations in the Persian Gulf are very similar to those before the Iraq invasion, and because the neoconservatives in the American administration are prone to this sort of stupidity and craziness, we have been fully prepared in terms of hardware and military arsenals but also software and information for electronic warfare," said Hamidreza Taraghi, head of the international affairs office of the Islamic Coalition Party, a conservative parliamentary group close to the Iranian leadership.
The clang and clatter of military hardware and rhetoric from all sides has trickled into Iran's daily discourse. Ordinary residents say they fear a U.S. attack is imminent and that they are powerless to prevent it.
"Will the Americans attack?" is the question on the lips of every Iranian who meets a foreign reporter.
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh's New Yorker articles detailing U.S. plans to attack Iran, and a Russian newspaper report specifying this Friday as the day for U.S. airstrikes have made the rounds of blogs and Persian-language satellite channels.
Ahmad Bakhshayesh, a professor of political science at Tehran's Allameh Tabatabai University, suggested Iranians thought the British naval personnel were assigned to test Iranian military readiness.
"One scenario is that their intrusion was a prelude for a large-scale assault," he said.
This week, Maj. Gen. Hassan Firoozabadi, Iranian armed forces chief of staff, predicted that the U.S. and Israel would launch a massive attack on the region this summer.
"International Zionism and the Palestine-usurping Israel with the support of the reactionary neoconservatives of the U.S. are preparing a new plan," he said, according to Iranian news agencies.
"Americans and the West will lose with this plan," he said. "But the Islamic countries are in danger."
