January 11, 2008
The Plot Thickens In The Strait Of Hormuz
UPDATED.
The strange confrontation between U.S. naval ships and Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz Sunday morning just got a bit more puzzling. Yesterday, as the U.S. Navy began to express doubts about some details of the clash shown in a Pentagon video of the incident, Iran released its own audio-visual version of the story on its English-language Press TV.
The Pentagon's video featured a brief encounter between the speedboats and Navy ships, followed by a radio transmission, purportedly from Iran's Revolutionary Guard, that ends with a gruff, heavily accented voice saying in English, "You will explode after (indecipherable) minutes." AP has a full transcript.
In contrast, Iran's footage features a brief and seemingly routine encounter between the speedboats and U.S. ships, with very different audio to go with it, according to the Los Angeles Times' transcription:
"Coalition warship 73, this is Iranian navy patrol boat 16. Come in. Over," an Iranian sailor aboard a speedboat says in English to a U.S. warship apparently in the distance. "Request present course and speed.""This is coalition warship 73," a voice says over the radio in American English. "I am operating in international waters."
Joints Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen said today he could not determine whether the threats heard in the Pentagon video came directly from the Iranian boats, a point first made by a U.S. Navy spokeswoman yesterday. Still, Mullen said "the incident ought to remind us all just how real is the threat posed by Iran and just how ready we are to meet that threat if it comes to it."
Mullen also noted that the incident reflects a strategic shift by Iran's military to use smaller speedboats for patrols in the Gulf.
"We're not anxious to see a miscalculation here which could occur, and certainly not anxious to get into combat with them," Mullen told reporters at the Pentagon. But he added, "Please do not misread restraint for lack of resolve, and those ship COs [commanding officers] will defend themselves."
Defense Secretary Robert Gates also weighed in yesterday, dismissing Iran's contention that the Pentagon tape was fabricated and echoing President Bush's assertion earlier this week that Iran had engaged in a "provocative act." "I think that what concerned us was, first, the fact that there were five of these boats, and second, that they came as close as they did to our ships and behaved in what appeared to be a pretty aggressive manner," Gates said.
As for the discrepancies between the two video accounts of the clash, New York Times reporters Thom Shanker and Nazila Fathi write that "the two clips do not necessarily contradict each other, as both sides would have had enough time for a number of encounters of varying tenor." In contrast, Slate's Fred Kaplan surmises that "the likely explanation for the differences is this: The two videos are of two different incidents."
The Lede and the London Guardian further probed the conflicting reports about the incident. BBC News' Paul Reynolds points out "worrying similarities with the incident in 1988 when, in the same Strait of Hormuz, the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, having failed to monitor the radio traffic properly."
Posted at 3:54 PM
Posted to:
Bush Administration, Iran, Middle East, President Bush, Robert Gates
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