Caught With Our Pants Down In The Gulf
Submitted by Justin Raimondo via AntiWar.com,
Your bullshit-ometer should be making an awful racket in response to the shifting explanations given for the twenty-four-hour Iranian hostage scare involving two US Navy boats intercepted in the Gulf.
First they told us “at least one of the boats” had experienced a “mechanical failure.” Then they said the boats had run out of fuel, although it wasn’t clear if they meant both boats. Then they said “there was no mechanical problem.” Then they claimed that the two crews had somehow not communicated with the military command, although “they could not explain how the military had lost contact with not one but both of the boats.” As the New York Times reported:
“Even as Mr. Kerry was describing the release on Wednesday morning, American military officials were offering new explanations about how the two 49-foot patrol boats, formally called riverine command boats, had ended up in Iranian territorial waters while cruising from Kuwait to Bahrain.”
And they still haven’t explained it – or any of the other distinctly odd circumstances surrounding this incident.
The best they could do was have an anonymous Navy officer aver “When you’re navigating in those waters, the space around it gets pretty tight.” However, as the Times put it:
“But that is hardly a new problem, and the boats’ crews would almost surely have mapped out their course in advance, paying close attention to the Iranian boundary waters. And each boat has radio equipment on board, so it was unclear how the crews suddenly lost communication with their base unless they were surrounded by Iranian vessels before they could alert their superiors.”
We are told they were on a “training mission” – but what kind of mission? The Washington Post adds a helpful detail by telling us that “The vessels, known as riverine command boats, are agile and often carry Special Operations forces into smaller bodies of water.”
Ah, now we’re getting somewhere.
Amid all the faux outrage coming from the neocons and their enablers in the media over the alleged “humiliation” of the US – Iran “paraded” the sailors in their media! They made one of the sailors apologize! The Geneva Conventions were violated! – hardly anyone in this country is asking the hard questions, first and foremost: what in heck were those two boats doing in Iranian waters?
And if you believe they somehow “drifted” within a few miles of Farsi Island, where a highly sensitive Iranian military base is located, then you probably think there’s a lot of money just waiting for you in a Nigerian bank account.
Anyone who thinks the adversarial relationship between Washington and Tehran has turned into “détente” due to the nuclear deal is living in Never-Never Land. Our close ally, Saudi Arabia, has all but declared war on the Iranians and that means we are being dragged into the rapidly escalating conflict. In this context, two US military boats coming a mile and a half away from a major Iranian base in the Gulf isn’t an accident. This ‘training mission” was a military incursion, and although we have no way of knowing what mission the US hoped to accomplish, suffice to say that it wasn’t meant to be a kumbaya moment.
Rachel Maddow is also raising questions about this: after a load of nonsense about how showing the sailors on Iranian media violated the Geneva Conventions – they didn’t: we aren’t at war with Iran yet – she pointed out the suspicious nature of the Pentagon’s shifting story during her January 13 broadcast.
To add another layer to the mystery, the Iranian government released the sailors after holding them for less than twenty-four hours – which isn’t the sort of behavior one might expect if those sailors were on a spy mission. And the Iranians issued an Emily Litella-ish statement, as reported by the Los Angeles Times:
“’After explanations the U.S. gave and the assurances they made, we determined that [the] violation of Iranian territorial waters was not deliberate, so we guided the boats out of Iranian waters,’ said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossein Jaberi Ansari, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.”
So if those two boats were “snooping,” as the Fars News Agency originally claimed, why would Tehran come out with this all-is-forgiven statement?
None of it makes any sense, at least not until one realizes that the Iranian government is hardly a monolith: power is divided up between various agencies and factions, with only the loosest sort of unity being enforced by the Supreme Leader. Farsi Island is controlled by the hard-line Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the hard-line faction of the ruling elite, which wields enormous political and economic power within the multi-polar Iranian state apparatus. It was the hard-liners who released the video and photos of the American sailors with their hands in the air, and their spokesmen demanded an apology from the US. It was the diplomats, however – the moderates, who negotiated the Iran deal – whose contacts with the US facilitated the sailors’ quick release.
But it isn’t just the Iranians who are riven with factions and conflicting lines of authority: the American empire is overseen by a vast national security bureaucracy involving both military and civilians, and it isn’t monolithic, either. Although, in theory, civilians are in the drivers’ seat and the military just follows orders, in reality the Pentagon is an independent power that can obstruct or even effectively veto whatever diplomatic or military plans the White House has in mind. And while opposition to the nuke deal was centered in Congress, the Pentagon insisted at the last moment that sanctions on conventional arms and particularly those related to ballistic missiles remain in place. Iran’s recent testing of medium range ballistic missiles must have the generals in an uproar, and it could well be that this “training mission” in the Gulf was related – as either a spying mission, or an outright provocation designed to imperil relations. Or perhaps both.
We’ll probably never know for sure: but what we certainly can know is that the official explanation for this latest incident stinks to high heaven. There’s no denying we were caught by the Iranians with our pants down. The only question is – how were we trying to f—k them over?
I warned after the signing of the Iran deal that we are in for a long series of provocations in the Gulf, and this is only the beginning. In order to keep all this in perspective, just remember that the long dance between Washington and Tehran involves at least four partners, including their hard-liners and ours.
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Sounds like the plotline for a new 'Expendables' movie.
"I repeat, this is a strict re-con only. Do not engage under any circumstances. Got it?"
" Well, what if we ran out out of gas, our GPS goes down and the engines fail? Can we blast our way out?"
" That is a negative, gawddammit!"
3 Americans have been kidnapped in Baghdad (inside Dora neighborhood). No one has claimed responsibility but newspapers are saying militia. Kidnapping is a growth industry in Iraq these days so could be anyone.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/three-americans-kidn...
Washington Post has printed some lurid details. Not sure why WaPo is going into such detail on this one? Brothel visit?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/reports-3-americans-missing-in-bagh...
Those "hostages" DID NOT look like spec ops.
Horse face agreed to some form of apology going from the US to Iran just before the final details of the agreedment were made (essentially releasing Iran's 100 billion and taking the sanctions off). So who was going to apologize, a bunch of "low on the totem pole individuals in riverine boats". It might not have seemed liek much to us especially with the story changing but the Iranian President had it all blown up to show Iran has much more power than the US.
seems when your gps and engine go tits up, your machine guns don't work either..looking at the crew, they well don't measure up to a spec op team.
these guys and gal were sent there to give pr to: Iran is playing nice with us.
remember the brits got a gun boat taken by Iran a few years ago, and let the crew go. seems Iran is playing nice.
Whilst there is interesting fodder here regard possible GPS spoofing of the vessel nevigation systems and the stupidity of the vessel commanders in using a single system for navigation in the first place, I think they all miss the elephant in the room.....
WTF is the US Navy doing in the Gulf anyway?
Just how does the security of the Gulf affect the national security interests of a family in Salem Oregon for example?
Why are these questions not asked?
Squid
We here at ZH well know that boating accidents are very common events and occur frequently.
What would Obama have traded had the Iranians not captured our boats? The mullahs got good timing.
Make no mistake; nothing happens in the ME without preplanning by the CeyeA and the black ops boys knowing all about it. Their surveillance is superb, their intel is spot on and the their evil background manipulations are pervasive. The assholes that run the ME shitshows have billions and billions and billions of dollars to play with and can create any scenario they want.
See and hear an ‘on the ground’ pair of witnesses from the recent Libyan Clusterfuck.
Feeling queasy about US foreign policy and machinations yet?
I don’t know about the rest of you sleepy heads and scare-dee cats but this shit PISSES ME OFF!
~ DC
Want to do something useful? … Copy that video above and cache it somewhere safe. …. It won’t last long on the net.
BTW, Durden, thanks for the before and after photos of Damascus. The world needs to take a good look at what the NWOdor is up to and brace yourself for a home visit from these well financed, evil fuckups.
~ DC
This whole thing is pure bullshit.
First. Every commercial fishing vessel that operates in US waters in required to have a positioning beacon that allows the Coast Guard to monitor location.
They do this because many vessels were violating areas closed to fishing.
If civilian boats have this technology who thinks that the military would not deploy something similar.
As stated these boats are used for special forces insertions.
Those would most likely not be in uniform. Everyone in those Iranian photos had a uniform on. As a side note the Navy has gone full retard like many police forced. Camouflage uniforms??? Are they going to try to blend into all that vegetation in the middle of the ocean.
Back to my point. No one in the photos was out of uniform so I suspect that the boats did make their drop.
Geneva violations??? Has there been a conflict since WWII where the US has not violated the Geneva Convention????
Another thing. Hostages??
MIlitary units caught on the territory of another country are not hostages.
Who writes this bullshit?
Are they this stupid or do they think we are?
Here are a couple of theories about the unique timing of the event:
Set-Up: Obama Coordinated Iran Hostage Release for SOTU; Riverine Capture Scuttles?
Set-up? Navy Boat Capture with Woman Sailor (Iran); Final Decision Now About Women in Combat RolesIran doesn't need the United States.The world has changed.Notice that right away the Europeans are in there.Iran is the perfect place for for business if the right deals can be struck because of Iran's trade deals with China,Russia and numerous other countries in the region.Don't worry though,the boneheads in Congress and in the Senate and Pentagon still fail to understand that trade today can still be done outside the SWIFT system.They don't need American Dollars,the Europeans will stab Washington in the back,they're in economic trouble.