The Bush administration not only was fooled by a well-known radio heckler, but was practically foaming at the mouth to kill people over the rantings of the well-known local prankster, whose antics have irritated and entertained bored sailors in the region for over twenty years.

That is how stupid they really, really are.

Ten-Four, good buddies.
.
"Adapt or perish." Murphy's Law? Nope, Darwin's Guarantee.

...I would also add a key constituency - the punditocracy, be they traditional or non-traditional. A piece I sent to Sean-Paul yesterday afternoon:

I'm sorry, but this whole notion rattling about the blogosphere that the Iranian speedboat story is "falling apart" is complete groupthink. In my view the story got built into something it wasn't right from the word go by a confluence of the media, DC folks spouting off, bad message management and bloggers themselves. Pretty easy to take the story apart when it wasn't as billed in the first place. I know that you acknowledge that the IRGC is a potential threat and that your take on the consensus is qualified, but man this stuff is just getting stupidly out of hand.

Does the aggregate of the event mean that the USN was under any substantive threat? Probably not. However, they need to honour the threat (i.e., take it seriously - one of the last times a small boat got close aboard the ship involved damned near got sunk, and the IRGC has a long history of interest in this specific tactic). Given that filling the Pasdaran with holes every time the USN sees them is pretty counter-productive, they use other measures, such as publicly letting the Iranians know that if they keep it up it's possible that next time or the time after they're going to get taken out. One has to look at things in total perspective, and folks aren't even trying to do that. I can't help but notice that some of the same folks who are so receptive to the notion that IRGC guys in speedboats are no plausible threat to USN forces also accepted as a matter of faith how Paul Van Riper showed how the USN would get it's ass kicked in a conflict with Iran. Funny how suicide boat attacks were central to Van Riper's tactics. Small boat activity like this is either a plausible threat, or it isn't - and I'd argue pretty strongly that it is, meaning that even in peactime operations they need be deterred, preferably via non-kinetic means.

This whole trend towards nitpicking at superficial quasi-manufactured crap at the expense of larger truth is really starting to piss me off. If bloggers are so damned smart, they might start by noting that their punditry missed a couple of pretty key things:

1) the USN vessels have 25mm guns on them that no one noted in any of the blogiating or media coverage that I saw which would shred one of these speedboats in about 2 seconds, provided the gun could bear and wasn't masked by superstructure (in fact, they were added to the hulls specifically to counter this type of threat);

2) it's pretty damned interesting that two of those vessels, out of almost all the other hulls in the USN were involved - the USS Port Royal and the USS Hopper were/are involved with ABM work, something of no little relevance, given the importance of ballistic missiles to the Iranian deterrance strategy (I'd assess at about 85% that it's coincidental, but it could just have piqued Iranian interest); and

3) why is it that the Iranian footage was released first on Iran's Arabic speaking network? - as in, the story is being quite explicitly targeted outside Iran's borders, without folks bothering to pick up on that notion.

In my view what we've seen over the last couple years is the gradual construction of a system where folks wanting to fill screens with seemingly pertinent commentary look increasingly at just one aspect of a story, take the easy shot and move on. By all means folks, critique the administration - lord knows there's lots there to critique - but why is it that the "other" never gets looked at? Hell, almost always the "other" is simply reduced to a caricatured counterpart to the target of critique, all the better to play whatever role is required of them on that particular day, driven by the nature of the critique rather than the nature of the "other". Foreign relations is about relations - meaning that understanding the tactics, motivations and capabilities of the other side is every bit as important as understanding US tactics, motivations and capabilities, and it would seem that no one can much be bothered to look at the other side of the relationship.

It's getting to the point where any entity opposed to the US would have to be truly terrible at IO not to score major points against US positions - to a non-trivial extent this is due to the fact that this administration is pretty bad at foreign targetted IO, but it is in large part also due to the fact that the IO battlefield is so advantageously "prepared" for US opponents by conventional and particularly non-traditional media based within the US. Frankly, carried to extremes it's pretty damned dangerous and has the potential for real mis-perceptions that could escalate real damned fast.

[re-lurk]

All revolutions are supported by many who would not have supported them had they had a clear understanding of what the revolutions were in fact to bring about. ~ J. Dunn

Welcome. eom

I am not quite sure what you are going on about. The original story is that the Iranians unprovoked, messed with us, threatening sinking of our ships. As you seem to be aware but nevertheless deny, the mere presence of our ABM ships so close to their coast is a plain provocation. They respond. These are games that are and have frequently been played by quasi-belligerents on the high seas for quite some time. If you remove the clearly tacked on threat to sink, the Iranian behavior is apparently not at all unusual or distressing. We provoke, they respond, with both of us acting within clearly established bounds. When we make this into an incident for political purposes we are the ones who create a truly significant provocation. This is what is being exposed. You miss the point.

Heckler or provocation aside, (do speedboats get within a few hundred meters of U.S. warships in the Strait of Malacca, the Strait of Singapore, or any other crowded sea lane) after the Cole, I'm suprised the navy doesn't open up on any boat that gets that close. Much closer, and you are out of the arc of fire and it is too late.

Exposing the political purposes of spin of the event is one thing, as if that is a suprise with the power that be, but that does not excuse Iran.

If they get burned playing games, maybe they should rethink the game. Same goes for the U.S. if they get stuck with an exploading boat next to one of their hulls.

Oh, my bad, that already happened.

You know I hang on your commentary as if Moses himself descended again from the mountain, but blame the punditry? Come on. Here's a quote from the President of the United States himself, "“It was a dangerous gesture,” said President George W. Bush about Sunday’s incident that involved five vessels, apparently under orders from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, harassing U.S. naval forces in international waters in the Straits of Hormuz. They broke off moments before the Americans opened fire.... “There will be serious consequences if they attack our ships,” Mr. Bush (said.)

Walter Russell Mead, Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy as quoted in the Wall Street Journal on January 10.

Actually, I think I've seen those words directly from the mouth of Bush in a CNN news video. When the Commander in Chief of the world's largest military chooses to underscore the legitimacy of a military provocation and then expresses himself in nearly the exact same language as preceded the invasion of Iraq, then I think it's absolutely incumbent upon the 5th estate to maul every aspect of "they're coming to get us" stories in an effort to insure story credibility. Actually, it may be our only hope.

...then here's my first Commandment to you, hvd and everyone else:

Look at what the other guy said - how they think, how they see the world, what they believe. If they're worth using in an argument, then they deserve more than simply to be viewed as ciphers, constant only in that they believe what happens to buttress the argument of the day.

The Iranians view ABM-equipped ships as a specific provocation worth confrontation over? Really? Based on what evidence? Given that the system is so much dead weight topside in the absence of someone actually launching a ballistic missile [viewing it as provocation is rather akin to viewing installation of a burglar alarm as a provocation to steal the neighbour's stereo], in my view the Iranians would realize that given current constraints [if they recognized it at all] all it means is that their ballistic missile chits actually have value in the geo-strategy game, Persian Gulf edition, and that they represent both a cost-effective deterrent and potent regional lever. They've said as much every Qods Day for a decade or more.

Similarly, don't accept Mead's implicit assertion that the vessels acted under orders from higher IGRC command - Mead's a big picture guy and in this case he's made an assertion that should in my view not be accepted as fact, without specific evidence backing it. Iranian decision making for this type of action is frequently not tightly controlled and centralized - one of the few points of agreement WRT Iranian strategic thought is that they generally do not trend towards extreme centralization of direction, but rather emphasize flexibility, improvising to take advantage of opportunities created by the complexities and probabilistic quirks of the real world. By implication, in my view it's quite probable that higher didn't order IGRC forces out on the water to confront the USN - but they damned sure knew what to do when handed a golden IO opportunity.\

"This meant that the proponents of Islamic traditionalism had appropriated the most potent myth of modern politics, the myth of the revolution. ~ Said Amir Arjomand [rather puts one in mind of the primaries]

The Navy vs. Administration/Pentagon

That'd be "the media, DC folks spouting off" and "bad message management" for $2,000 Alex...

Add in the propensity of bloggers of all stripes to go single stage to orbit on anything having to do with Iran, whether they understand it or not, whether they know the history or not, and here we are where we are. An IO operator's dreamy fantasy.

Seriously folks, we've got to get better at this...

"A survey data set containing imputed values should not be analyzed uncritically as if all the data were real values." ~ Graham Kalton

My interpretation is that he is saying that the Navy discounted importance of the event, as I and that the White House/Pentagon were spinning it in another direction. From what I can tell, the Navy viewed it anything but a big deal. To me it is not so much a matter of "bad message management" as that the WH effort was "unsuccessful."

Or was it? Kinda depends on what it was all about in the first place. Why pick on this incident to blow up? And why on the day President is going to the ME? HMMM. Sounds like a Cheney/Hadley operation to paint the news with a crisis while the Commander in Chief is in the area. From that point of view, the news cycle was dominated by "the Iranians almost taking us to war" for a few days. This Kabuki theater was actually from my perspective was very successful operation. While the reality based community figures it out, you are on to your next gambit.

...though not identical things. When I say "DC folks spouting off", I also include folks in the puzzle palace (i.e., that five-sided building on the Potomac). Me, I think the original impetus came from the guys in the Gulf, and when it hit DC (and particularly when it started getting play) it was just too damned juicy for folks of all stripes to resist sinking their teeth into.

As to why the guys in the field would have publicized it in the first place, as I PMed at the time:

I'm not so sure that I would file this as someone hyping war with Iran as many appear to be - in fact, it sounds quite plausible to me that folks might be trying to de-escalate conflict. The US Navy didn't have to publicize this, particularly in this way. My guess is they publicized it because:

a) they feel a responsibility to be open (and fear how it might look it they weren't open and conflict breaks out down the road), and

b) they want the IRGC guys to understand how close they came to getting greased and desist from this behaviour.

US forces have a strong motivation to not fall into a tit for tat with Iran at the present time - the Iranians have chosen not to double their bets in Iraq as I feared they would and are being more cautious with their proxy involvement. Right now, in the absence of stupid escalation, both sides are developing a reasonably effective modus vivendi. A decent avenue might be to seek something like the the long periods when Hezbullah and the IDF reached similar accomodations in Southern Lebanon.

I see this as the natural product of a whole bunch of parties hyping their particular caricature of various parties, without much caring whether those caricatures correspond with reality.

"A survey data set containing imputed values should not be analyzed uncritically as if all the data were real values." ~ Graham Kalton