This all seems to be a bunch of bull !@%^& you all are talking, seems to be coming from your own mouths. You bunch of Allah Akbar lovers deserve what you get. I just hope an prey the next time this country gets hit again that your mother, fathers, brothers,sisters, and last but not least your kidds are in the very place that these fake bombs go off. Also besure to catch a flight with the one that plan to crash another building, this way maybe I my family and other people that are true american and want to be protected. As for you, feel free to tell me how wrong i am after it crashes and explodes...OH YEA! ALLAH AKBAR ALLAH AKBAR.

Excellent point to hammer away at the thick rind of self-righteousness governing American policy and media response. Time to WAKE UP and THINK!

Well, it's a matter of trust at this point. The Bush adminstration and its enablers in the other party, by many indicators, no longer have the trust of the American people. So if Iran were to genuinely attack a US vessel, there's very little reason for anyone to actually believe it. And plenty of reason to assume that Bush & Co. are up to their usual subterfuge.

I'd say they're no longer fit to govern the waning American Empire.

"Imagine, for a moment, that Iran had sent its navy to patrol in the Gulf of Mexico.."

Then and only then might I feel the least bit threatened. As it stands so far no Iraqi, Saudi, Morrocan, Libyan, Iranian, Pakistani, Malasian or any other 'muslim extremists' has EVER threatened me or anyone I know in any way shape or form.

This is bullying of the highest magnitude.

Are we to believe for a second that any other country on earth has the military power to conquer us? This is pure madness..

IMPEACH THESE MUTHERFUKKERS ALREADY!

How can you have a democracy, if you don't know what your government is doing?

Garbage in, garbage out. Bad information makes bad decision making.

Your election process is a joke. Obama says he is for change (a zillion times). Change from what to what? Clinton is changing her message from experience to change. It would be nice to hear from candidates that actually want to change something, for a change.

Americans, born to a life in one of the most prosperous and free lands on Earth, are sleep walking their way towards a disaster that previous generations struggled long and hard to spare their children.

"...it is the Bush/Cheney administration that must get the blame"

They can share the blame with the Democrats who refuse to impeach and take Cheney's finger away from the button.

Leaving Cheney unfettered proves to me that the Democratic Party has the moral fiber of a drunken babysitter.

The three American ships were a guided missile cruiser 567 feet long, a guided missile destroyer and a frigate with a combined crew of 915, the five Iranian speed boats were little more than the boats you'd see towing skiers on your local reservoir in the summer.

(When the Navy said the Iranian vessels were boats instead of ships it was a give away as to how dire the "threat" was.)

I think we all need to understand that some countries aren't allowed territorial respect. It doesn't matter if your capital is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world. It doesn't matter if the US equipped Iraq with a vast array of weaponry to murder the citizens of your country in a decade long war. It doesn't matter that the US actually supported both sides of that war in order to prolong instability in the region and ensure that we were still in a position of control. Forget about the Iran Contra scandal. It's irrelevant. There is nothing wrong with supporting both sides of a bloody decade long war and it is not a valid reason to distrust the motives of the US. Oh, and you can't link that muderous support for the Iran-Iraq war to the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut. That was an unjustified, unprovoked terrorist act. Oh, and that unprovoked terrorist act is a perfectly legitimate reason to diplomatically freeze out a country for two decades. Iran needs to get over their whining and see things from the US point of view without any regional historical context. How could they hold any grudge against the US. I mean, we don't.

Johnson had the Gulf of Tonkin to justify attacking Vietnam and the media went along with it as well. It wasn't till long after the war that we found out that the incident in the Gulf of Tonkin was provoked by the US. So many lessons this country has failed to learn.
Hoa binh

Never beleive co-opted mainstream media without a thorough re-checking of the facts from other sources. There are still quite a few people in this country who still swallow the B.S. they peddle.
This country needs a thorough purging of the psychopaths that having been running this place for some time now.

locust stated "Leaving Cheney unfettered proves to me that the Democratic Party has the moral fiber of a drunken babysitter."

Actually, it proves to me that the Democratic party is just the left wing of the money party, the other wing being the Republican party. Thinking that either party has the best interests of America -- meaning you and I -- requires one to willfully overlook the obvious.

BS indeed! Iran's navy has a couple of destroyers (built in the 1940s and rusting in port) a frigate or two that're almost as old and not seaworthy either. They do have some kilo class diesel subs from the sov union. But it's not certain that the port workers in Iran can keep them seaworthy either. It's the smallest branch of the Iranian armed forces. Some threat there... One modern frigate of the Canadian Navy could sink the entire Iranian fleet without needing to reload.

When I first heard this story I thought that it was a piss poor copy of the Gulf of Tonkin incident - except, of course, it was far more likely that the Vietnamese would attack the yanks directly than the Iranians would. Trust me, the rest of the world knows what happens to countries that attack the usa directly, why do you think none has done so since Dec. '41.

Don't forget the US naval blockade of Japan's oil sources as being one of several provocative acts by the US that led Japan to bomb Pearl Harbor .

Thank you! This is EXACTLY what I said to my brother last night when he told me the news reported that Iranian ships were "provoking" the Navy. Puh-leeze!

jlocke--

1.) we're not ALL sleepwalking. many of us are doing what we can.

2.) go to john edwards' site and read his six-point platform. concrete, clearly defined goals, not vague calls for "change." i'm not sure why the M$M isn't doing MORE to suppress him.

it's easy to sit back wherever you are and snipe. what are you doing for YOUR country?

Any time a writer sees through the propaganda of the corporate media and their militarist administration and Congress, as Lindorff does in this article, it is heart-warming. He describes the elusive obvious—what if we were on the receiving end of such militarism? Bravo!

Question: What would be the U.S. reaction to massive Iranian warships a couple of miles from NY Harbor?

McCain, when asked what his "pet peeve" is, said "hypocrisy". I wonder how his hatred of hypocrisy would see this Iranian reaction to U.S. warships kissing their shoreline? How would his hatred of hypocrisy impact foreign policy in a McCain presidency?

it's the same brand of BS that frames israeli military atrocities in occupied palestine as "retaliation"---a game of blame-the-victim, so that rachel corrie became responsible for her own death by terrorizing that bulldozer operator.

The US's actions that McCain supports isn't hypocracy. The imperialist, we-own-the-world impusle has been indoctrinated in all of us USAns down to pure instinct. Even a profound cynic like me needed Lindorff's article above to remind me how absurd calling yesterdays incident a Iranian provocation was.

The right of the US State to threaten any other State with anhillation, for any reason, is axiomatic. To question it is to question the color of the sky on a clear day.

It must be difficult to be a purported ally of the great hegemon these days and to have to pretend to believe what issues from its halls of power and to make decisions consistent with one's own best interests but not obviously in contradiction of the propaganda.

mikec January 8th, 2008 1:02 pm :
"we're not ALL sleepwalking. many of us are doing what we can."

"go to john edwards' site and read his six-point platform. concrete, clearly defined goals, not vague calls for "change." i'm not sure why the M$M isn't doing MORE to suppress him."

"it's easy to sit back wherever you are and snipe. what are you doing for YOUR country?"

1 Surely mikec, a reasonable person would infer that, of course, when I say "Americans" I don't mean every last one of them. I mean their totality, in a national sense.

2 Yes I've heard about Edwards' deathbed conversion to getting out of Iraq. It is a little late to be credible, don't you think?

3 Snipe? Why do Americans so often use military terminology? (assuming you are American) And why so defensive? Don't you think it sounds a little odd for people who invade and conquer nations around the world to be telling others at the same time to mind their own business? In case you missed geography class, we live on the same planet. The US has a major impact on all of us. At least your votes get counted sometimes;)

The Bush alarm clock goes off in the morning and the sleeping American population, is groggily groping for the Obama snooze button.

Imagine if the Soviet Union had missles in Cuba . . . .

It's a good thing only 35% of the USA are BDF's the rest have the sense to see though the bull biscuits put out by the MIC, me thinks most who are war glory boys should get off their video war games, and stop watching Hollywood bullshit as well

Was Cheney really there on one of the aircraft carriers? Where did this info come from? If true, why the hell was he there when this incident was going down? Did he know about it ahead of time?

And, my understanding is that Iran has a load of Stinger missles (from Russia) that could take out the U.S. armada on their door step in about 28 minutes. Of course Iran itself would get vaporized. I'm beginning to wonder if Cheney is really trying to provoke Russia by getting into a spitting match with Iran. What with the missles the U.S. is trying to put on the Russian border and all.......

Oh, I almost forgot about the oil and gas thingy. Russia and China are making deals all around the globe for access to oil and gas. Particularly in Iran, South America, and Africa. I think the U.S. has demonstrated that they don't intend to share control over the oil and gas resources of the planet with anyone.

Just sayin' that provoking Iran is just part of this David and Goliath situation........

No one with half a brain is going to attack the world's superpower. The U.S. needs to quit its lying and nonstop propaganda. No one believes the U.S. government anymore. The U.S. government WANTS an oil-rich Muslim country like Iran to attack it and is frustrated because Iran won't, so they're going to go ahead, with Israel's help, and start another war.

"Can anyone show me a picture of a 'Iranian Revolutionary Guard boat"?
A boat!?! Sure, boats are going to attack a Navy cruiser, destroyer and frigate. With what? Why no pictures? Why no identified sources?
The official said he didn't have the precise transcript of communications that passed between the two forces, but said the Iranians radioed something like "we're coming at you and you'll explode in a couple minutes."

My war started with an "attack by boats" that was fired-upon by our brave-Captains (killing, I believe, one Enemy-Whale in the Gulf of Tonkin, where we also 'didn't-belong') — and that-incident, too, lacked a "precise transcript of communications that passed between the two forces" [but how informative would that enemy-whale-song (or its death-throes) have been, anyway — even if 'threatening'?].
Like I said, Iran is 'in-pocket', and KNOWS there will be no-'war' (other than the sort of cooperative ColdWar/"good-cop&bad-cop" we played with the USSR for so-long…and so-Profitably).
All this 'noise' is just meant to scare-you [and, apparently, 'HAS']...

"The American corporate media will also be responsible though, for our domestic news organizations are playing the willing propagandists here as willingly as did Pravda or TASS in the old Soviet Union."

"In dictatorships we are more fortunate than you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know its propaganda and lies. Unlike you in the West. We've learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines, and unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive."
dissident Czech novelist Zdener Urbanek

In the 1930's Will Rogers said, of the US Navy patrolling Chinese waters: "Now, how'd you like it if the Chinese sent one of THEIR gunboats, full of THEIR marines, up the Mississippi to protect their laundries in Memphis?"

OIL OIL OIL OIL OILY manipulate OIL prices OIL OIL OILY OIl OIL military spending....military budget...u do not use it u lose it...OIL OIL OIL...

http://www.farsnews.com/

Impeach the lying bastards.

Have we not heard this story before around some gulf like Tonking or something like that? it feels like an old story to me, let's hope that it does not continue the same way.

"Aggressive", "threatening", etc. have no place in this discussion, at least not as regards the manner in which the Iranians approached the US Navy. It's common practice on the sea and in the air to approach the craft of another less than friendly nation when they come near your territorial space. It's not "prepare to die!" it's more like "Hi there. We see you. You see us. Let's not do anything stupid, okay?"

"Gulf of Tonkin" was my first thought as others above have noted. Since shrub's thunder was stolen over the 'Iran will have nukes before I change my socks again' shit, now they trot out the old "they attacked our ships!' plan. I too want to see pictures of these alleged 'boats'. My very first thought was a bunch of small rubber Zodiacs pissing around our 'battle group' or whatever they are calling this idiotic and aggressive provocation. hardly a threat I'd bet. I liked the analogy above about having Iranian battleships about 15 miles off Florida or New York. Or occupying Texas or Cali....

There's more to this guys,

I pointed out to Scott Ritter last year that Cheney and Haliburton were drilling natural gas and oil deep in Iran using the USarmy as intimidation to keep prices low. (see things our way or else.) Hal claims it does not violate the trade restrictions because they launder the money through a front company in the Cayman Islands. We told Scott to check google earth to see the fresh roads and drill sites leading from iraq into Iran; he did, and posted a subsequent article where he expressed his professional opinion as a former marine intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector that drilling was going on, on the wrong side of the border. Scott has the coordinates for anyone who is interested (if the VP hasn't blurred it already as he did the Naval Observatory in DC, Greenland and Iceland blue "mullians" lakes.)

The straights of Hormith are tight. To expect a third-world bunch of ragheads to stay out of international waters just because your warship flotilla is clogging it, is unreasonable.

It is clear to me that Dick Cheney is trying to manufacture another war-for-profit fleecing of the taxpayer. As loyal Americans, we should not be silent watching him suck the corporate congress into another war-profiteering scam.

The above is all just my opinion only.

pacplyer

Was looking for website of past presidents biographies this morning, and Googled for bios, presidents since '64. The first one that came up on Google was guess who? Vice President Dick Cheney. The "Vice" was shadowed. Found that rather telling.

I saw the newscast about the Iranian boats harassing our ship. One flag was flying on one of the little boats, and the newscaster noted it, then said the boats were Iranian. My thought at the time was how anyone could put that little scene together, and stick an Iranian flag on one of the boats, then have the media raise the hue and cry of Iran trying to provoke us.

The Pilgrims and the Puritans (and the generations of tenure-needy scholars and teachers who made them "the beginning") built a wall into the American psyche---cross over it, talk to "the enemy," even attempt to take a different people's point of view and you get the stocks or, most of the time, far worse; for the object of the christian-capitalist game is to keep their own people terrified, confined, manipulated and working hard for elite profit. (In Israel they're called "settlers" as if Palestine is the old "empty American West," which never was, either---true insanity)....You go there to provoke them into doing what will then righteously entitle poor injured You to their resources. And if any of this were being done to you, you scream louder than anybody else on the planet. Yeah, Obama's gonna change everything. Please.

Navy in Gulf better bring sunblock:

http://www.rense.com/general59/theSunburniransawesome.htm

Correction,

Not iceland. It's Greenland and Antiartica that no longer show the millions of blue lakes melting on the surface of the fragile ice shelves and ice caps.

Mysteriously, the whole continent was blurry last I tried to use it. I can see why, too. No need to start a worldwide panic just because the ocean is going to be 20 feet higher in the next fews years!

We are in a lot of deep chit!

The above is all just speculation on my part.

pac

this iranian provocation bs (i'm presuming that stands for bull shit) is just that. it is yet another event/spectacle designed to take mindless america's mind off of the impeachment processs. each and every time impeachment begins to gain momentum, yet another event occurs, making the press scurry around like the dumbasses they are, trying to outdo one another in sensationalism. slowly, sadly, america crumbles.

Crumbling definitely, but not so sure about the qualifiers. Slowly? Sadly???

Excellent link Samski,

So, I guess one of the questions here is:

What the helll is the fleet doing bottled up in the gulf like sitting ducks?

A: Pearl Harbor. (let most ships there get hit and go down, so defense contractors can make the case for building new ones! Prelude to WWIII.)

Is this what you people want? Another World War? This VP must be put into a straightjacket immediately.

the above, as all my posts are, are just my opinion only.

pac

Bush Derangement Syndrome has been diagnosed on this thread.

wasn't one of the reasons that we went to war in Vietnam there supposedly were gun boats that attacked a U.S. naval vessel?

arvy,
you're probably right, it's more like rapid-fire mode now. it's only sad because one hates to see a good thing end. not that it's been all that good for the last seven years...

Research actions leading up to Gulf of Tonkin resolution!

John Adams, the father of the US Navy, is probably rolling in his grave.

Despite constant political heckling and destruction of his re-election prospects by the war hawks, our second president, who built a strong Navy against Jeffersons wishes, refused to use it. Even though Napoleanic France was attacking and looting American shipping and Spain and Britain were encroaching on US borders.

Adams knew when the nation could not afford another costly war, and had the wisdom to put himself in political jeopardy with Hamilton, who had raised a huge army and was demanding to invade Florida for empire and glory. A world war was imminent.

Adams forced the peace delegation to embark for Europe, made a truce with France, and disbanded Hamilton's Army. Hamilton never forgave him and used the first instance of political party machinery to "swiftboat" a candidate.

We need another man like John Adams to save us from the mindless Warhawks.

I refused to waste one second of my remaining moments on this planet reading about some ridiculous charge of "Iranian provocation" in some US propaganda rag (US newspaper). When I originally heard this trumped up and hypocritical accusation against Iran during a "teaser" for a local news station, I knew immediately that the fascist iron triangle of Bush/Cheney, the MSM, and their corporate conglomerates were fast at work setting up another excuse for American imperialism of a country that is rich in profitable natural resources, but has never been a threat to the United States.

Thank you, David Lindorff, for nailing this one. As usual, it is the US government that is doing the provoking and then following up with propaganda--lies and distortions designed to manipulate weak American minds into another jingoistic and xenophobic frenzy. Of course, its Pravda-esque PR arms in the media are more than willing to play their part. Why? Because the corporate conglomerates that own all the media profit handsomely from psychological manipulations of American nativists with room temperature IQs and war.

Iran did not start this fight, the bullies in the US government did. They always do. Just business as usual, American style.