Letters to the Editor
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Sorry the US Military has to defend Greenwald and these letter writers
What a pathetic article. I'm ashamed that our military is required to defend Greenwald and most of the letter writers here. Shame on all of you. These speedboats had no reason to be that close to our warships.
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Official Version of Naval Incident Starts to Unravel
Glenn and all,
You might want to take a look at this report from IPS News at http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40747:
Official Version of Naval Incident Starts to Unravel
Despite the official and media portrayal of the incident in the Strait of Hormuz early Monday morning as a serious threat to U.S. ships from Iranian speedboats that nearly resulted in a "battle at sea", new information over the past three days suggests that the incident did not involve such a threat and that no U.S. commander was on the verge of firing at the Iranian boats...
~snip~
...The U.S. warships were not concerned about the possibility that the Iranian boats were armed with heavier weapons capable of doing serious damage. Asked by a reporter whether any of the vessels had anti-ship missiles or torpedoes, Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, Commander of the 5th Fleet, answered that none of them had either of those two weapons.
"I didn't get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats," said Cosgriff...
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A simpler reason
You know, at some point between the Iowa and New Hampshire voting I was having a conversation about how there are no headlines with the word "Bush" at this time. Everyone's attention is on the horse race and (if one reads, say, Greenwald's blog) on how the media is screwing it up. Nobody gives a crap about the President and his wargames anymore... oh but look! Just as I was thinking that Iran hasn't been in the news for some time, there they are, Iranian gunboats making dangerous maneuvers. They're threatening us! War is imminent! Eek!
In other words, don't you think this incident has been trumped up just to jerk our attention back to Bush and his Global War on Everyone? The boy needs to feel relevant again. Last time he was slipping in the news coverage, he vetoed a string of popular bills. Now he's issuing warnings to Iran over this boating incident. This has long crossed the border of farce and become just ... depressing. 2009 can't come soon enough.
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@Malkin
Seeing Alan Colmes toss up Gulf of Tonkin as his first reaction, rather than, say, the USS Cole, to cast skepticism on the US here is just a bonus…. But I’m sure he supports the troops.
"But I'm sure he supports the troops." Now clearly, you mean that sarcastically, but... to what end?
Who cares if Alan Colmes "supports" the troops? What does that mean anyway, saying nice things about them? Who cares? What has Alan Colmes got to do with the war effort as a whole?
Does any apologist for the Neocon Wars really care whether or not, I, some nerd on the internet, is sufficiently troop-supportive?
Does anyone sit up at night praying that evil libtards will begin supporting troops in some unspecified fashion?
Why would Michelle Malkin care at all?
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Nequals1 and Tomhere
I also remembered some pushback from the military on Iran, but the best came from William Fallon of CentCom. Head of the Joint Chiefs, Michael Mullen, I think has been a bit more hawkish. But I did find a very interesting quote from him.
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has taken command of Iranian naval operations in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. military has revealed.
That means U.S. naval forces are operating in the same waters as an organization the United States considers a major supporter of terrorist activity.
Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the disclosure Wednesday at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he was answering questions from military students.
Afterward, in a written statement, the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet in Bahrain said, "Based on activities observed in the Arabian Gulf over the past several months, it appears the Iranian navy has shifted its patrol areas to the Strait of Hormuz and Gulf of Oman -- leaving the IRGC navy to provide the primary Iranian naval presence in the Arabian Gulf."
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/11/29/iran.navy/
Note that the US accusations on the current incident blame the Revolutionary Guard, but just a few weeks ago Mullen pointed out that the Guard was patrolling the Gulf, not the Straits of Hormuz.
Interesting...
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If we're dealing with speed-boats...
...then we're wrong. It means we are practically in their backyard. Imagine what we would do or how we would feel if a foreign power routinely stationed task forces of nuclear armed warships just beyond our territorial waters. The USS Vincennes episode demonstrates exactly why stationing naval forces just outside someone else's home waters is so provocative and dangerous.
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Gulf of Tonkin
Please recall that the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" spanned 2 days from the real incident, when the Maddox fired, to the totally fake incident 2 days later.
The Straits of Hormuz incident happened a full 1.5 days before the press release. If it was such a devastating incident, why wait? If not, why release? Someone in Washington worked hard on this one, regardless of what happened. And the lap up act by the press -- Glenn is absolutely right. They absolutely can't believe a tear in a candidate's eye wasn't planned, but had no questions at all about any of this. Second press total credibility fiasco in as many days.
The rest of the world believed the Iranian version nearly immediately. If you ever needed to measure the drop in American credibility since Bush took office, here it is.
Hope all the people who were talking it up in Washington Press circles with their retired analysts and foreign policy whatevers is aware: In Pakistan right now, the word on the street is that the U.S. is going to invade. It's based on the belief that the U.S. invaded Iraq 6 months after it became worried there might be loose nukes there. The "proof" that this is going to happen is that Mohammed El Baradei is headed to Pakistan to inspect, and the very widely copied and publicized articles calling Pakistan the most dangerous country in the world, read as "we're on the list."
I hope the press understands that what they say has consequences, and looks up from their lotsayuks cocktail party long enough to let us know when they've finished cooking America's credibility to death between commercials for mindnumbing drugs with minor side effects like rashes, syncope, hemiplegia, and post-mortem lividity.