With respect to the encounter yesterday morning local time in the Strait of Hormuz, I think the facts are known to many of you. USS Port Royal, USS Hopper, USS Ingraham were in bound the Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz routine transit.
In the early hours of the morning, daylight hours of the morning, they were encountered by five total small high-speed craft that we assessed to belong the Iranian Revolutionary Guard navy. The five boats approached the formation on the formation's starboard bow in international waters slightly inside the gulf from the apex of the strait, broke into two groups, one to one side of the formation, one to the other. The groups maneuvered aggressively in the direction of the U.S. ships. They were called on radio; they were -- ships' whistles were sounded, those sorts of things, to draw attention to the fact that their maneuvers were a cause of concern to the commanding officers.
At one point during this encounter, we received a radio -- the ships received a radio call that was threatening in nature, to the effect that they were closing our ships and that the ships might -- the ships would explode, the U.S. ships would explode. Subsequently, two of these boats were observed dropping objects in the water, generally in the path of the final ship in the formation, the USS Ingraham. These objects were white box-like objects that floated, and obviously the ship passed by them safely.
The encounter continued, with the boats maneuvering close to stern and after -- under 30 minutes total, they returned in the direction from whence they came, to the north, back towards Iranian territorial waters.
I was mostly interested in the incident as an example of how the factional nature of Iran's governing class could be exploited by a faction eager to start a nuclear war--even if that faction doesn't control the atomic weapons that Iran will deploy.
Yet it isn't all about an example, but the incident itself. Ralph Peters thinks we should have blown away the boats as a lesson:
We should've sunk every one of them.
Not because we're warmongers. But because the Iranians had made threats, verbal and physical, that amounted to acts of war. When will we learn that resolute action taken early saves vast amounts of blood and treasure later?
Oh, from Washington's perspective we did the right thing by "exercising restraint." But Washington's perspective doesn't amount to a gum wrapper in a gutter. What matters is what the Iranians think.
They now believe that the Bush administration, our military and the entire United States are afraid of them.
Peters has an excellent point. I think we had good reason to exercise restraint in this incident. We don't want to reshuffle the deck in Iraq by giving the Pasdaran the leverage to reignite their full support for Shia thugs attacking our troops and murdering Iraqi civilians by making other factions worry that we are itching for war with Iran.
On the other hand, we don't want to be lulled into thinking that Iranian speedboats will always pull away without pulling the trigger. While one reporter in the press conference asked why our big ships are afraid of little speedboats, the question is stupid. Given that if we shoot first a quarter of our people will cry "Tonkin Gulf!" I'm sure our Navy instinctively feels that we must be prepared to absorb the first blow before we can respond. Under those circumstances you'd be stupid not to worry about letting small boats close to expensive warships. Anyone ever hear of the Cole for Pete's sake? And I don't rule out that the American commander on the scene rightly determined that he had time before he had to shoot. But what of the next time? What if next week harassment isn't the intent and attack is?
So we need to be ready for the next incident. We need to take advantage of the fissures in Iraq's ruling mullah class to target the provoking Pasdaran naval elements without striking the assets of other factions or visibly striking Iran to cause a reaction inside Iran that allows the provoking faction to trigger general war or allow factions eager to fight us in Iraq to regain freedom of action.
To that end, we must make sure the other factions in Iran know that the next time the Pasdaran sends their speedboats at our ships, we will sink every one that gets within 250 meters of our ships. And we will strike other Pasdaran naval elements at sea within 5 miles of any of our ships as a further lesson. But, we assure them, such a strike is not the beginning of a general war against Iran or a broader strike against Iranian assets.
So warned and reassured, the Iranian factions not involved will probably not want to get involved. We smashed up Iran's naval forces pretty well in the late 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War without provoking full war. We could do it again and teach the factions that poking the United States is not the best way to win their internal political battles.
We will need to monitor the Iranians closely and be ready to strike the blow with our assets in the region and not just the ships targeted by the Iranians. Get the job done quickly within four or five hours and then announce the end of the incident.
If the Pasdaran think they can get away with spooking us like this, they may think they can get away with an actual attack--and ride our passivity to an advantage in the Byzantine struggles for power in Persian Iran.
We could afford to run a risk this time, so I think Peters is wrong that we lost this round. But I think Peters is right in his logic about the next time.
We need to treat the next approach by Iranian boats as the attack run it might very well be. Clear for action, Navy.
UPDATE: Austin Bay writes about the incident and the previous incident involving the capture of British sailors and marines:
Both incidents fit into a consistent historical pattern, one the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Ledeen believes the U.S. government ignores at its own long-term peril. "It is never surprising when the Iranians attack us," Ledeen told me the day after the gunboats' display of moxie, "because they have been attacking us for 30 years."
The best long-term U.S. strategy is political and economic -- encouraging an active domestic political opposition to Iran's clever religious leaders while whittling away at the clerics' graft-crammed Swiss bank accounts. This incremental strategy, however, takes time and perseverance.
True, the long-term strategy requires us to pressure their finances. But in the short run, the Iranians may attack us. Take no comfort from the fact that it will merely be a faction of Iran's power structure.
Nor am I convinced that we must risk an actual attack to avoid "playing into their hands." These provocations bolster the radical factions by allowing the instigators to show how brave they are and to argue that we are too weak to respond. The temptation to actually attack one of our ships will seem to be not too much of a risk if they convince themselves we will not react. So the risk isn't just from reacting and provoking a unified Iranian response.
Yet if we squeeze Iran's finances and make sure the other factions know that we will strike the offenders narrowly, I think we can avoid "playing into their hands" and further isolate the madmen who sally forth to taunt our warships or even attack them.
The video of the incident seems to show that we truly had time to blow them away if we had to--it isn't like they were within RPG range.
UPDATE: The Weekly Standard writes that this indeed could be practice for a suicide boat attack that also lulls us. We should, therefore, respond at the next close encounter but we may be able to send a message without shooting. Maybe we could use one of those nausea-inducing "non-lethal" weapons we've developed. It would be a darned shame if one of those boats flipped because the driver was too sick to control the thing.
