Mr. Bush’s public warning to Iran was accompanied by the deployment of an additional aircraft carrier off Iran’s coast and advanced Patriot antimissile defense systems in Persian Gulf countries near Iran’s borders.

The carrier movement was initiated long ago. The public warning to Iran was accompanied by acknowledgement of the deployment.

... I suppose there's still a chance it could all be bluster.

...capable systems are deployed (presuming that that's what they're concerned about, these things also work real good against aircraft). My first guess is that they'll be plunked down in Qatar (and nearby, Qatar's not that big) to defend CENTCOM's forward HQ and similar facilities. It's important to remember that they're talking (at least publicly) about moving one Patriot Batallion. That's not very much in the grand scheme of things - I tend to think that if they were seriously worried about eating some sort of large scale retaliation of the sort that would potentially come after a strike on Iran, they'd be moving pretty much every Patriot asset they could into the region - IIUC, there are twelve battallions, only a couple of which are spoken for (e.g., Korea), and they've moved one. Iran fields a couple hundred missiles that can hit US assets down the south side of the Gulf - given the number of times Patriot may have to re-engage in order to down an incoming missile (it's not an encouraging number, let me put it that way), I would sure as hell hope that they'd deploy more batteries if they thought there was a real chance of a serious Iranian missile attack.

As to the deployment of USS Stennis, I think it's important to remember that this deployment advances Stennis' time on station by (I think) a few months (not quite sure how long they were supposed to spend filling in for Kitty Hawk). Given the timing of the announcement and given that USS Eisenhower is currently conducting operations off Somalia, I kind of wonder whether they didn't know when they made the announcement that Ike was going to have other work on her hands. When I think about the implications of this naval power I tend to think not so much in terms of Alpha strikes on putative Iranian weapons production facilities (I don't think two carrier groups has enough horsepower for the task) and more in terms of sea dominance - boarding, seach and cordon sanitaire for shipments going into and out of Iran.

I think the increased play against Iranian operatives isn't an attempt to goad Iran into open military conflict (as a pretext or otherwise) - I think it's an attempt to: a) to send a message to Iran to not "interfere" too much, b) remove a bit of the bargaining chip that Iran currently holds in that domain, and c) send a set of messages to the Iraqi counterparts. I generally don't tend to have a lot of faith in the wisdom of folks that try to send messages using military force (notoriously narrow bandwidth and a very low error correction potential) so I'm quite nervous, but that's I think what they're doing.

"At this moment, therefore, two distinct myths emerged, fuelled by the trauma of a shared experience and amplified by the existence of a hungry mass media eager to disseminate images of the world's first televised revolution." - Ali Ansari