Highjinks in the Gulf

The Bush administration has pumped up the Jan. 6 incident in the Strait of Hormuz as a provocative action by the Iranian regime that came close to escalating into a fire fight at sea, or something worse. Not so long ago, President Bush suggested that Iran's nuclear ambitions raise the specter of World War III.

There's no doubt that Iran's Revolutionary Guards too often play things perilously close to the edge in these volatile oil-shipping lanes: last March, for example, they seized 15 British naval personnel in the Gulf, and mistreated them during two weeks of interrogations. But let's get all the facts before leaping to conclusions--either, that the Iranians were threatening a USS Cole-type suicide attack on a U.S. naval vessel, or conversely, that the Pentagon hyped the incident as part of some sneaky plan to justify an military strike on Iran.

Both U.S. and Iranian authorities agree there was some kind of interaction between their forces in the Gulf on Sunday, and that no shots were ever actually fired. Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, the top U.S. navy commander in the Gulf, said two groups of Iranian boats approached three U.S war ships in a way that was "unduly provocative." Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman called the Iranians "reckless and dangerous."

It was left to anonymous American officials to give more details to back up the claims that the Iranians were being provocative. These officials said the Iranian boats came within 200 yards and radioed a threat. The LA Times quoted an anonymous military official saying, "They said something like, 'I am coming at you and you will explode.'" The NY Times got a similar anonymous quote from an "American official": "I am coming at you, and you will explode in a few minutes." Anonymous officials also said that two of the Iranian boats dropped boxes in the path one of the U.S. vessels. Anonymous officials went on to say that the commander of a U.S. navy destroyer was very close to giving an order to fire and taking out one of the Iranian boats.

By contrast, Iranian officials played down the incident, with Foreign Ministry Spokesman Mohammed Ali Hosseini calling the interaction "an ordinary occurrence." Without providing details, other anonymous Iranian officials also denied any Iranian provocation. Unlike in the British incident last year, Iran does not seem to be making any claims that the U.S. acted provocatively in the Sunday incident.

We need a more factual account from U.S. officials to back up the dramatic version of events laid out thus far by the anonymous briefers. If there was such an explicit threat over the radio airwaves of blowing up an American ship, there should be a recording and transcript of it. U.S. authorities also presumably checked out those mysterious boxes.

Given the U.S. Cole attack by Al Qaeda in Yemen in 2000, U.S. naval officers have every right to be concerned about unconventional attacks on the high seas. But especially with such undocumented accounts, we have to keep in mind the possibility that naval officers are capable of misreading threats as well. In 1988, a U.S. naval officer gave a command that shot down an Iranian passenger airliner and killed hundreds of Iranian civilians in the apparent belief that the plane was a hostile threat to his vessel, the USS Vincennes.

It's hard to believe that at this low point in American credibility in the world that the Bush administration, much less the professional military, would think of fabricating an Iranian provocation in order to justify a U.S. strike to take out Iran's nuclear facilities. Many skeptics have been quick to draw analogies with the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which Lyndon Johnson hyped and distorted in obtaining congressional backing for greater American intervention in Vietnam. It is worth noting that the dramatic accounts and warnings provided by the White House and Pentagon came on the eve of a historic Middle East tour in which Bush will try to rally Arab opposition to Iranian policies.

What is beyond dispute is that there is an immense risk of conflict between U.S. and Iran, whether by design or accident. The Bush administration has projected vast American military power into the Gulf to pursue what it labels American strategic interests in the region, such as rebuilding Iraq and protecting the global energy supply. Iran is wary of such superpower interference in its neighborhood, especially given nearly 30 years of U.S. antagonism and persistent Bush administration threats to undermine the Islamic regime, part of Bush's "axis of evil."

The continuing campaign of influential neo-conservatives against Iran, despite the recent intelligence report that said Iran had shelved its nuclear weapons program in 2003, makes it imperative that allegations about Iranian misbehavior be backed up with facts and put into proper perspective. Otherwise the result may be, perhaps not another world war, but some kind of war that few want and nobody needs.

--By Scott MacLeod