Wayward hikers should be OK in Iran

A little more than one year ago, I was a US tourist at Khorramsharh, standing near a bridge on the Arvand Rud, a river known outside Iran as the Shatt al-Arab.

It was twilight on a clear evening, and a pleasant breeze tickled our senses as we looked across the boundary river that has meant tension for local people since a 1639 peace treaty between the Persians and the Ottomans.

Most recently and tragically, this was where Saddam's army stormed across in 1980 to begin the Iran-Iraq war. In the next eight years it killed more than a million people, including almost an entire generation of young Iranian men.