About that Straits Incident…

I don’t pretend to know whether the U.S. Navy’s version or the Iranian version of last Sunday’s incident in the Straits of Hormuz is more accurate or whether the two versions may not even be mutually exclusive, but I think there are two interesting points worth making — the first, regarding the reaction (or, more precisely the lack of one) by the familiar clutch of hawks to what was depicted as an major provocation by Iran; and the second, the possibility that the Navy and the Pentagon chose to dramatize the incident not so much to isolate and embarrass Iran as to enhance the chances for a new “incidents- at-sea” agreement that they have been pushing on the White House without success for many months now.

1) The neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks (aside from the macho statements made by most of the Republican candidates during their debate Thursday night) have been remarkably quiet about the incident. Nothing really on the websites of either The Weekly Standard or the National Review (one would have expected at least something from Victor Davis Hanson, not to mention Michael Ledeen), nor on the AEI website. In fact, virtually the only peep we got from the usual suspects appeared on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, and that was by Walter Russell Mead who offered a historical defense for Washington’s naval dominance of a vital oil route and expressed relief that the incident did not escalate into actual hostilities. Contrast this silence with the virtually instantaneous howling by the hawks over a) the Hainan Incident in early 2001 and, of course, last spring’s capture by the Iranians of the British sailors and marines. They jumped all over both incidents, declaring that anything less than a strong show of force and an ultimatum to the evil-doers amounted to appeasement. I think the lack of a similar response shows that the neo-cons, in particular, are increasingly dispirited and resigned to the fact that the realists have wrested control of Iran policy, despite Robert Gates’ own rather hawkish statements this week.

2) Indeed, Gates’ rather hawkish statements notwithstanding, I wonder whether the conventional interpretation — that the administration and the Pentagon were trying to draw attention to the alleged threat posed by Iran as a way of framing Bush’s trip to the region and especially to the Gulf — is accurate, but not in the way the pundits have suggested to date. Specifically, I wonder whether this was the Pentagon’s equivalent of the intelligence community’s NIE on Iran’s nuclear program. More

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.