Lessons from the Filipino Monkey

Glenn Greenwald’s treatment of the incident in the Strait of Hormuz is missing some of the revelations to come later, but has the right central point: the incident mainly shows the unreliability and incredibility of the Pentagon. With what we now know, it should be fairly evident the irony of Defense Secretary Robert Gates rhetorically asking who one would better believe: Iran or the Pentagon. The answer from the start has been clear and it has not been the Pentagon.

The Administration has been so eager to point fingers at Iran that George Bush has declared himself outside the intelligence consensus (and after reading all those books!) and pressed the nonexistent case for fearing a nuclear attack from Iran. It has a long history of staging Gulf of Tonkin type events (including provocation of the Korean War, and piggybacking on civilian efforts, the Maine incident). And more recently, it has resurrected the Five O’Clock Follies with the fraudulent stories about the Jessica Lynch story and toppling of Hussein’s statue at Fardis Square, not to mention the propaganda about turning points in the occupation, and the Petraeus show.

Iran, on the other hand, has little obvious reason to lie or to stage an episode, albeit this may reflect the US perspective. From Iran, it may seem that it does get some benefit from focusing international and domestic attention on US bellicosity, but this is just speculation, because we really don’t get much of any news here that shines a light on the view from Tehran.

The story was largely concocted. It initially did not appear worth reporting, but a day later it had become dramatic with the report, from which the Pentagon has since distanced itself, that the captain of one of the US warships was on the verge of ordering fire on the Iranian boats when they backed off, and that the boats had dropped mysterious white boxes into the water. A video released by the US was altered by merging footage that did not seem particularly disturbing (no white boxes, no aborted order to fire) with a black screen over which a voice could be heard telling the US (or the Iranians?) “you will explode.” The audio had no trace of a Farsi accent, and did not have the same ambient noise as the actual transmissions from the Iranian boats. It has since been reported by Navy Times and other sources that navigators of the Gulf are familiar with heckling messages of similar character in this region, threatening US warships, and these have been routinely been assumed to be civilian transmissions unassociated with Iran.

Martha Raddatz, appearing to be a credulous idiot (sorry) on Washington Week in Review, said the US captains were really scared. This begs a whole series of questions, mainly, scared of what? The implication is that the tiny Iranian speedboats could have crippled a gazillion-dollar US warship. If so, I have a plan to reduce the navy budget by about 90% replacing our fleet with outboard racers. My first thought was that the Iranians would obviously scratch the hull paint on the pride of Annapolis if they tried anything. My guess in fact is that a speedboat could produce minor but disproportionate damage sufficient to put the captains in concern that they would be forced by standing orders to engage the boats, and thus put themselves in the middle of an international incident. Another question I would hope for somebody to ask is, “what do you mean by behaving provocatively?” What does a small boat do to provoke a big boat? The failure to state anything particular that constituted the provocation was a red flag. George Bush commented that he found the actions (of behaving provocatively) very provocative. He also did not say why.

The final part of the story is the Pentagon’s claim that the US vessels were engaged in transit passage into the Persian Gulf, operating in international waters five miles outside Iranian territorial waters. This is, it turns out, nonsensical in a whole variety of ways. There are no international waters in the Gulf. Outside of Iran’s territorial waters lie Oman’s territorial waters. Ships typically enter the Gulf on the Iranian side. No agreement recognizes transit passage into the Gulf on the Oman side, and the agreement that allows the rest of the world access to the Gulf through Oman’s waters has never been ratified by the US. I find this striking because it would seem to be something easy to check, and yet most outlets got it wrong.