Letters to the Editor
Jkalos
Published Letters: 486 Editor's Choice: 3
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@the anonymous guy
[Read the article: The grave Iranian threat to world peace]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]addressing RMP. Consider this post quoted by sysprog yesterday:
Jeff Huber
http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,159657,00.html
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Iran Aweigh (Again)
by Jeff Huber
The story of the incident between U.S. and Iranian naval forces in the Strait of Hormuz Monday morning may tell us more about the nature of today's news reporting than about the prospects for war and peace in the Middle East.
[...]
A Confederacy of Dissemblers
What we know of the incident so far comes from official and mostly unnamed sources who were nowhere in the vicinity of the Strait, and comes filtered through journalists who often don't seem to know what they're talking about. Much of the reportage is also conspicuously contradictory.
[The] statement that "U.S. forces were 'literally' on the verge of firing on the Iranian boats" and "had moved to man their guns when the Iranians turned and sped away" is a prime example of every flaw in the narrative. If U.S. forces were just then moving to man their guns as the Iranians turned and sped away, they were closer to the verge of sleep than of firing on anybody. Those guns [...] were either manned when the ships set condition Zebra prior to entering the Strait or those skippers will be handing their command pins over to the three-star in command of Fifth Fleet by the end of next week. It's disheartening but not unexpected that the reporter didn't know that, that some source in the Navy told him the story that way, and that despite the deliberate artificial tension in the narrative, nobody in the scenario was on the verge of firing on anybody else: literally, figuratively or conceivably.
[...] It sounds to me like the "white box-like objects" the speedboats dropped into the water were Little Rascals technology simulations of mines, painted a bright color for the express purpose of ensuring the Americans saw them and steered around them.
[...] The Australian identified the spokesman as one Bryan Whitman, but it didn't mention what Bryan Whitman does in the Pentagon or how he came to be a spokesman for it. It happens that one Bryan Whitman is the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, which makes him part of the Office of Strategic Influence (AKA Ministry of Truth) apparatus that Donald Rumsfeld established to support his wars through misinformation, disinformation, and psychological operations. One of Whitman's most notable contributions to the cause was his attempted whitewashing of the Pentagon's Jessica Lynch hoax.
[...]
So who knows what exactly happened in the Strait Monday morning? I sure don't, but I'll tell you something I do know. U.S. and Iranian naval units have been playing patty cake in the Strait and the Persian Gulf with each other since the tanker wars of the 1980s. I can't count offhand how many times I ran the Strait of Hormuz scenario during the 90s, in tabletop experiments, computer simulations, live play exercises and real world operations. The skippers and crews of the American warships had to have been prepared for what they saw on Monday. Granted, when it's really you transiting the real Straits with five real Iranian speedboats making a run at you, that's a bona fide pucker patrol; and it appears that the U.S. crews conducted every step of the operation by the letter.
Still, back in my day, we called that sort of thing "free training." After all the helmets and fire hoses were put away, we reckoned we'd had a jolly old time, trading love taps with gloves and headgear on, and suspected that the other guys considered the whole thing to be good clean fun too.
So like Bhutto's assassination, the Turks bombing of the Kurds, and other recent fiascos, Monday's incident in the Strait of Hormuz was worth noting as yet another example of how far American policy has run adrift under the Bush administration's stewardship.
But it was nothing to take to your backyard fallout shelter over.
#
- - Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired)
Freelance writer Jeff Huber was operations officer of a naval air wing and an aircraft carrier, and he commanded an E-2C Hawkeye aircraft squadron. His analyses of military and foreign policy affairs have appeared in Proceedings, The Navy, Jane's Fighting Ships, and other print periodicals. Some of his essays have been required student reading at the U.S. Naval War College, where he received a master's degree in national security studies in 1995.
http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,159657,00.html
One of the commenters at military.com responded:
I have done this passage 11 times in my 22 years 3 months and 11 days( but who's counting) in the Navy and I saw Iranian(enemy?) and Omani(ally?) gunboats every time. This is just sensationalism at its best. If those CO's hadn't been ready for this we would have heard of that CO losing his/her command for "loss of confidence in the ability to command." I don't see much newsworthy in this occurance other than the pictures looked kinda cool.
- - ChuckW65
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Denning
[Read the article: The grave Iranian threat to world peace]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]well said. I have often thought that the problem with folks like our current rulers is that they are not smart enough to be selfish enough, given the seeming paradox that the thing most in our self-interest is to act with compassion.