Don't get fooled again...

Early Monday morning in the Straits of Hormuz several Iranian Navy patrol boats approached or encountered US warships. The subsequent media accounts of the encounter are now well known, and, undoubtedly many Americans believe that the Iranian ships approached the US ships with aggressive intent. The standard media narrative perpetuated by CNN, Fox News, CBS News and others, is that the US ships were within seconds of opening fire on the Iranian boats, and that the Iranians had broadcast a message threatening the US vessels with explosives. Several high-ranking officials in the Bush administration commented on the Iranian "provocation," including Bush himself, and attempted to use the incident to further support the notion that Iran represents an imminent threat to peace in the region. Aside from the quoting of anonymous Pentagon and administration sources, the primary evidence supporting this narrative were rather unspecific video images of the Iranian boats as well as a partly garbled radio transmission suggesting some threatening action. However, nowhere in the video is there any direct evidence of the boats "running at" the US ships. And the audio "threat" is of such dubious quality that it is hard to take it very seriously. This is all beginning to sound like another fictitious naval "attack," that ostensibly occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin, and that was used to justify the bombing of North Vietnam, isn't it?

Now today we learn that the US version of events is indeed unraveling. Gareth Porter reported today several startling revelations concerning the incident:

1) It appears that US officials spliced the audio containing the alleged "threat" onto the video of the patrol boats, in an attempt to suggest that the threat came directly from the Iranian boats. It appears that such audio "chatter" among ships and boats in this war zone is rather common, perhaps not surprisingly so, given the nature of hostilities.

2) US naval commanders in the region confirm that none of the US ship commanders felt their ships to be threatened and felt no need to issue any warnings to the Iranian boats that they would be fired upon.

3) The Iranian government has released videotape (with audio) that suggests a much less confrontational encounter between the US ships and Iranian boats. Just for laughs, this is what one of the Iranian boats looks like. It really is a boat, and not a ship! While fast patrol boats can represent a real threat if armed with torpedoes or anti-ship missiles, these boats are not in that category, and it is difficult to believe that a seasoned US ship commander would regard such a craft as an imminent threat to the safety of his ship.

Based on these revelations it now appears rather likely that the episode was "engineered" by the administration for the purposes of attempting to escalate the rhetoric against Iran, perhaps to politically support Bush's weakened position with his Mideast allies in the advent of the release of the recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) indicating that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program. It seems reasonable to presume that the Iranian boats did encounter or approach the Navy vessels, but that nothing particularly sinister happened. The event was then seized upon by the Bush administration for its own political purposes, and the servile US media were more than happy to run with the story and blow it completely out of proportion.

Indeed, it appears that it is easier to dupe the mainstream US media than it is to steal the proverbial candy from the baby. How many times has the Bush administration fed the media a pack of lies, and had those lies spread across the front pages? Let's just name a few, WMD in Iraq; Saddam in cahoots with Al Qaeda; and most recently, Iran on the verge of nuclear weapons! Based on these examples, one can safely conclude that the media consider it their duty to simply report whatever Government officials tell them to report, with essentially no independent verification. And the more confrontational and sensational the "story," then so much the better for their ratings. This is more like the behavior of a State-run press, rather than a free one. After the WMD fiasco a number of major media outlets expressed regrets for "missing" the story, and published their obligatory mea culpas, and then it was back to business as usual, "..let's get fooled again."

What other insights can we draw from this incident? Several worthy of deeper inspection are the deeply ingrained stereotypes and double standards exhibited by our media, but also by many of us with regard to other peoples and nations. Consider, for example, the response that would ensue if Iranian naval vessels were to take up patrolling positions in international waters off the coast of say, New York or Washington? We know what the response would be, it would be considered an act of war and it is not hard to imagine that hostilities would inevitably result. Nevertheless, we expect that when we send large Naval task forces into the territorial waters of another nation, a nation we have threatened and whose neighbor we have invaded, that they should show the utmost restraint and respect. The double standard, the arrogance of our position is truly astonishing. Only the brain-washed or willfully blind could fail to see it. Unless we can overcome such deep-seated prejudices, our future as a Nation will continue to be filled with war.