Hey every­body! I’m back after a long hia­tus, hon­ey­moon and oodles of time with the in-laws. But I’m back in Beirut now and ready for action.
And what a day to come back to work. In a very dis­turb­ing devel­op­ment, [five Iran­ian Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guard boats harassed three big U.S. naval ves­sels in the Ara­bian Gulf](http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/01/07/america/US-Navy-Iran.php), nearly spark­ing a sea bat­tle, accord­ing to the Pen­ta­gon. Over the week­end, the five smaller ves­sels threat­ened an Amer­i­can frigate, destroyer and cruiser in the Strait of Hor­muz.
“Five small boats were act­ing in a very aggres­sive way, charg­ing the ships, drop­ping boxes in the water in front of the ships and caus­ing our ships to take eva­sive maneu­vers,” a Pen­ta­gon offi­cial said. There was also com­mu­ni­ca­tions between the Amer­i­cans and the Ira­ni­ans, which the Pen­ta­gon described to the effect of, “we’re com­ing at you and you’ll explode in a cou­ple min­utes.“
The story doesn’t describe them beyond “small boats,” so they could be patrol boats or the Iran­ian equiv­a­lent of the Amer­i­can RHIBs (Rigid Hull Inflat­able Boats), but even so, they could do some real dam­age. The [U.S.S. Cole](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing) and the [UK 15](http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0„-6796836,00.html) are high on everyone’s mind in the Gulf, as is the attack on the [U.S.S. Firebolt](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Firebolt_(PC-10)).
And from my time with the Amer­i­can, British and Aus­tralian forces in the Gulf, I can tell you the Ira­ni­ans are con­sid­ered the fore­most threat. [As I wrote back in July last year](http://www.spot-on.com/archives/allbritton/2007/07/water_and_oil_mix_in_the_gulf_1.html):

The Ira­ni­ans are a con­stant pres­ence in the Gulf, which is nat­ural con­sid­er­ing its long coast­line on the Gulf. And not far from KAAOT, they’ve made a naval base on a crane that sunk dur­ing the 1980 – 88 Iran-Iraq War. (Part of it still sticks up out of the water.) You can see it with the naked eye and Amer­i­can com­man­ders say the Ira­ni­ans are con­duct­ing recon ops on the Coali­tion forces.
The Iran­ian Navy gets some respect from [Cmdr. Jim Aiken, 40, who cap­tains the Amer­i­can guided mis­sile destroyer Chung-Hoon] and other com­man­ders, who told me that when pass­ing through the bot­tle­neck to the Gulf called the [Strait of Hormuz](http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://worldatlas.com/aatlas/infopage/hormuz.gif&imgrefurl=http://worldatlas.com/aatlas/infopage/printpage/hormuz.htm&h=426&w=427&sz=25&hl=en&start=3&um=1&tbnid=WdgznmPezyzFtM:&tbnh=126&tbnw=126&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dstrait%2Bof%2Bhormuz%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26hs%3D6j8%26sa%3DX), a pass­ing Iran­ian Navy ship pre­sented col­ors and her sailors saluted, hold­ing fast to naval tra­di­tions the world over. But the IRGC Navy is a dif­fer­ent story. The Coali­tion sailors I spoke with called them thugs and accused them of basi­cally run­ning a pro­tec­tion racket on dhows that ven­ture into their part of the Gulf.

At the time, I asked Aiken what would hap­pen if the Ira­ni­ans tried to grab some U.S. sailors like they to the 15 British com­man­dos back in March 2007. He mum­bled some stuff before finally say­ing the U.S. would shoot back. And that’s almost what hap­pened in this inci­dent. The Pen­ta­gon offi­cial said the Ira­ni­ans turned back “lit­er­ally at the very moment that U.S. forced were prepar­ing to open fire.“
What does this mean? I’m not sure yet; it could be just one of those things but it’s inter­est­ing that the IRGC took over Iran’s naval com­mand in the Gulf back in Novem­ber, accord­ing to the U.S. Navy. It could be a probe, a provo­ca­tion or some yahoos out of con­trol. The IRGC isn’t the most uni­fied or dis­ci­plined of armed forces. But no mat­ter what, the Ira­ni­ans have given Pres­i­dent Bush some fresh PR to use against them [when he comes call­ing on the region this week](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/06/AR2008010601574.html?hpid=moreheadlines) to shore up an anti-Iran coali­tion among Arab states.
**UPDATE 1÷8÷08 10:36:24 AM:** Folks more knowl­edge­able than me are chew­ing this over, and they’re smelling a rat. It *is* awfully con­ve­nient that an inci­dent hap­pens on the even of Bush’s visit to the region where con­tain­ing Iran­ian aggres­sion is high on the president’s agenda. And the Navy claims the IRGC-N is run­ning pro­tec­tion rack­ets and smug­gling. Could the dumped white boxes have been Iran­ian attempts to dump con­tra­band? On the other hand, the U.S.S. Cole inci­dent has made the Navy under­stand­ably twitchy. Those guys out there are *switched on*, big time. And Iran­ian expla­na­tion that they didn’t rec­og­nize the ships is implau­si­ble at best. A cruiser, destroyer and frigate aren’t small ships, and the only naval power of force in the Gulf’s inter­na­tional waters are going to be either Amer­i­can, British or Aus­tralian. The Ira­ni­ans knew with whom they were play­ing chicken. Per­haps this was an indi­ca­tion from Iran that it can cause trou­ble on mul­ti­ple fronts for the U.S. and its allies?
There’s also a his­tory of Iran­ian aggres­sion in the Gulf dur­ing the 1980 – 88 Iran-Iraq war and the war of the tankers. The Ira­ni­ans laid mines in inter­na­tional waters that led to the [U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts incident](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Samuel_B._Roberts_%28FFG-58%29#1988_deployment_and_mine_strike).
So, in short, there are good rea­sons for both sides to pro­voke the other, and it remains to be seen what — if any­thing — will come of this. In all hon­esty, prob­a­bly noth­ing, but we’ll have to wait and see.