Elite Iranian troops helped Hezbollah fire a sophisticated radar-guided missile at an Israeli warship, Israeli officials said Saturday, describing an apparent surprise blow by militants who had been using only low-tech weapons.
Iran denied that it had any troops in Lebanon.
Israel initially believed that an aerial drone armed with explosives hit the warship, but it became clear that Hezbollah had used an Iranian-made C-802 missile to strike the vessel late Friday, an Israeli intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information.
Israel says that about 100 Iranian Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) were involved.
First of all, why do news outlets insist on misusing the term "elite"? The Pasdaran are loyal--not elite. "Elite" implies a level of training in military skills that are simply not present in all but a handfull of the world's militaries. We have elite forces. Britain does. France does. Australia does. Israel does. And other countries have small forces one could call elite. But Iran? No.
Second, technically Iran's denial is good since Pasdaran are not the army and so I guess not "soldiers."
Third, the C-802 missile is sophisticated. Israel will have to go on the hunt for those missiles pretty aggressively. The best way to defend against being hit by one is to hit them first. If Israel wants to maintain a close blockade, more bombing will be needed. I wonder how many C-802s Iran sent to Lebanon?
This just underscores how much Lebanon has been turned into a forward base for Iran with Syrian cooperation. To hell with the Lebanese, I guess. Why would Iran or Syria care if the people of this country are put in the cross fire? Iran has been planning this crisis for a while, it seems.
This is serious stuff that could escalate pretty easily. And if it does, we need to be ready to destroy Iran's mullah regime to prevent them from trying again--perhaps when they have nukes. We may not be planning to take down the mullahs for months or years, but if the fight is starting now, we may have little choice but to fight now.
Let's not take our eye off the ball, people. If Iran starts a general war in Lebanon, we can still finish it in Tehran.
UPDATE: There seems to be confusion on the missile. Strategypage calls it a Silkworm missile but that is a Chinese version of avery old and large Russian missile. As near as I can tell, the C-802 is an entirely different animal. The failure of the missile to destroy the small Israeli ship does beg for an answer of what happened. Four dead from a huge Silkworm hit? Even the smaller C-802 seems likely to have seriously crippled the ship. But it lost four sailors and sailed home. Did the defensive weapons detonate either weapon just short of the ship resulting in a shower of debris that damaged the corvette? Did the weapon hit but fail to explode, causing fire from the fuel on the missile? We have a great interest in knowing what happened given that Iran has both weapons trained on the Gulf region.
SECOND UPDATE: According to a site cited by Winds of Change, the Israelis screwed up and then got lucky:
[The] missile struck a glancing blow to the large "helicopter" barn on the ship's stern, and bounced off, detonating in water nearby. The barn area was thoroughly scorched by a subsequent fire, and this is the area of the ship where the four crew members died. As we've noted previously, the ship was lucky that it didn't take a direct hit from the C802; the missile is more than capable of sinking much larger vessels.
It is not apparent if the ship took evasive or defensive measures prior to the hit.
THIRD UPDATE: Austin Bay reports on this as well here. The scenarios reported here are rather different. The missile was a C-802, a fairly advanced missile as I thought, based on the Exocet, and not a Silkworm. During the Iran-Iraq War, one of our old Perry class frigates took hits from a couple actual Exocets fired by the Iraqi air force and survived. So a smaller ship surviving one hit is perfectly reasonable. Defensive measures are not clear though it seems certain that the ship had its automated defensive missiles and gun turned off to avoid accidentally shooting down a friendly aircraft. Nobody knew that anti-ship missiles were in Lebanon.
