Unbelievable! But not so shocking given Iran and their leader's messiah (pariah?) complex. What would provoke Iran's Republican Guard to taunt the U.S. Navy in the Straits of Hormuz yesterday?
How close did those Iranian speed boats come to being obliterated? (seconds) Put yourself in the moment... speedboats come up close, dumping large boxes overboard in the path of the big US warships. Then the boats speed away.
Thanks to mil-blogger The Daily Blogster for his quick overview.
Just think about it. What happens if Iran actually chooses to sacrifice a few boats just to get the US to use its force? What does Iran gain by instigating a blockade of the busy oil transport lanes? Is Iran willing to walk away from exports of nearly 3 million barrels of oil a day? What does a naval war between Iran and the U.S. look like?
The Fifth Fleet commanders on the bridge that day should be saluted for remaining so, so cool under imminent threat. Remind me never to play poker with those guys.
2 comments:
Thanks for the link. I can really imagine it since I was just there 20 miles off the coast of Iran for 5 months.
Tense, very tense.
Dear Friends,
What follows are responsive thoughts to a speech delivered by former Congressman, Newt Gingrich, for a Jewish Fund Raising meeting just before Thanksgiving 2007 at the Selig Center. Normally, I would not site comments of Mr. Gingrich as the basis for positions I would take on any topic, but he is honest in leveling blame for foreign policy failures on the Bush administration where they should be. The topics for Mr. Gingrich’s speech centered around our troubling relationships with countries where U. S. taxpayer dollars are not producing a reduction in hostilities directed toward the U.S., namely, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq. He then discusses the perceived threat from Iran and what OUR government should be doing to quell it.
What is omitted in the Gingrich speech is that the current administration has presided over this failure to understand what is needed in the Near East. The fact that we contrived the rationale for going into Iraq and diverted attention from the REAL potential threat to stability, IRAN AND PAKISTAN. Arab people don't want certain American (Western) values or military presence in their society; the extreme element of this position is a contingent of the so-called Insurgents. They are lumped together as the embodiment of Al Queda. As Gingrich points out, our government has been inept at evaluating the real threats and developing meaningful strategies to address these challenges to peace.
By having an inept leadership that has demonstrated NO DIPLOMATIC LEADERSHIP SKILLS, we are bogged down in counter productive pursuits and are concurrently in greater danger of terrorist attack than ever before. I see red every time I hear our political pundits declare (in defense of our government leaderships anti-terrorist initiatives) "Well, we haven't had a terrorist attack since Sept. 11." In this matter, the democrats offer no greater leadership vision than the Bush people. The issue with Israel's survival and the injustice meted out on the Palestinians are major parts of what needs to be addressed, but again, no leadership, no diplomatic creativity to craft a new reality. The Arab countries don't relate to "democracy" as a desirable political system for their way of life; history demonstrates this. Look at our so-called friends, the Saudis. Double standard? Look at the moves being made to liberate their women. There is ample reason to conclude that Saudi Arabia conducts its local terrorist version of Head Start.
To create a Democratic state was the post-game flag we draped over the pre-emptive attack on Iraq to remove Sadaam, ignoring the counsel of academicians schooled in the subtleties of Muslim political realities who warned that removing Sadaam would unleash civil chaos among muslim factions in the power vacuum resulting from Sadaam's ouster. That perhaps explains why Sadaam was such a hard ass: to keep all those disparate muslim factions in check. It is naive, maybe even disingenuous, to expect that Malike and his political machinery in Iraq would be able to stabilize the socio-cultural reality of the current Iraqi situation anytime soon. How long will that take? Senator McCain warns that it might take a hundred years. This is the major justifiable rationale for maintaining, for the near term, a military presence in Iraq: to buy time for the reorganization effort. The pressure to pull out our military effort derives out of the public and political leadership, with the clarity of twenty twenty hindsight, realizing that we spent all our money, used up our military capability, killed a bunch of our children, screwed up the stability in another country and bought ourselves No Peace. It is tantamount to the situation in South Vietnam thirty three years ago, expecting the Vietnamese people (ARVN) to prosecute the war on their own (Vietnamization). We precipitated this mess Iraq due to our leadership trumping up charges and scaring the American people into believing that Sadaam was racking out with Al Queda and a world threat with WMD's. The Bush administration launched a PREEMMPTIVE ATTACK that was unprecedented in modern annals of time. It was a easily a violation of International Law even if Sadaam had WMD’s. Since when does a modern, highly evolved technical leader of the so-called Free World, attack another country and remove their government because that government is perceived as a threat? Senators Barak Obama and Ron Paul are the ONLY voices of reason that I have heard in the current political run for the Presidency who have been bold and discerning enough to declare that it was a mistake to attack Iraq.
Our allies, and the rest of the so-called civilized world knew the Bush initiative vis-a vis Iraq was out of bounds. It was for this reason they turned their backs on us and declined to participate. That's why we ended up dubbing it with that clever phrase: “The Coalition of the Willing.” The saddest element in it all is the loss of life and limb of our patriotic service people who have been exploited by the Bush presidency. The abomination of abominations is the reality that our servicemen and women will return to America from Afghanistan and Iraq with PTSD, limbs missing and psychological impairment only to wage a new battle with the Veterans Administration for treatment to aid recovery from their war induced impairments.
If the oil dependence issue were not present, the humvees would be shipped back home from Iraq tomorrow. Look at sub-saharan Africa, except for Somalia, our interest in the area is minimal. Africa offers little to us of importance to us strategically. It is tragic anytime blood has to be spilled in war; it is even more tragic when it is spilled foolishly. Iraq has fostered a foolish expenditure of our most valuable resources when we evaluate the cost in lives and treasury versus the payoff. As Mr. Gingrich suggests, given the North Korea, Afghanistan and Pakistan threat to peace, we had way bigger fish to fry than ousting Sadaam.
The Bush/Cheney administration has fostered public distrust to such monumental, unprecedented levels that some of us honestly ponder whether 9/11 was an INSIDE JOB? It doesn’t help that vice-president Cheny's former company, Haliburton, has made a fortune off of our operations in Iraq. There are a lot of us in the aviation community who have major questions surrounding AA flight 77 going into the Pentagon. There is too much that doesn't make sense for which no one is providing plausible answers nor even asking the questions. Why?
Sadly, the loss of respect and confidence in our leadership's vision in addressing the challenges present in the world creates a skepticism which makes it possible to believe that we are capable of incomprehensible public deceptions. Look back at the Gulf of Tonkin "incident," which triggered the green light for U.S. escalation of the Vietnam war. Consider that the highest Justice Department official in America illegally wire tapped Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. because he was suspected of being a communist engaged in subversive activities. The late President Richard Nixon lied and misused the public trust bringing down his presidency by failing to honor his oath of office to defend and uphold the constitution of the United States. Lately, former Eastern Airlines pilots lost their twelve year battle to have their collective bargaining agreement suit against Continental Airlines honored by the courts only to discover the district and appellate judges deciding the case may have been a stacked jury put into place by the President's head of the Justice Department, Roberto Gonzales, who resigned after exposure of allegations of Judge Tampering for political advantage. So much for Justice Being Blind.
Several years ago, I actually witnessed, along with some other ATA pilots on a PBS channel, credible documentation that even the Moon Landing was a hoax. I don't consider myself a fool but in the macro-view of the world nation interplay, I am harboring doubts about what is real and what is portrayed as being real in the increasingly complex struggle playing out in the international arena. I think America is potentially a great country; I say potentially because We Have Lost Ground due to mediocre leadership. If we are to resume our leadership position on the world stage, we have to live up to our moral billing as the national embodiment of freedom, truth and democracy. Honesty and integrity are a big part of viable leadership; of late it has been missing from our leadership
What's it all about, Alfalfa?
Peace and Health,
Bee Man
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