Daily Kos: Today's Iran Naval Provocation the new Gulf of Tonkin....
Inevitable....
Gulf of Tonkin, meet Straits of Hormuz- Daily Kos
Check out the reporting on this... why equivocate and put 'provoke' in quotes? Either they were provoked or they weren't. But beyond that semantic hedge is a whole bunch of problems. Unidentified sources. Inconsistent reports. Unconfirmed events. Ah the dulcet tones of The Mighty Wurlitzer ring across the land....
Now... lets look at the Straits of Hormuz, an extremely narrow waterway chock full of ships, both military and civilian.
Ships moving through the Strait follow a Traffic Separation Scheme (TSS), which separates inbound from outbound traffic to reduce the risk of collision. The traffic lane is six miles wide, including two two-mile-wide traffic lanes, one inbound and one outbound, separated by a two-mile wide separation median.
No one reports where in the straits this event allegedly occurred. No one reports whether the US ships were in a lane, out of a lane, near Iran's shore, or any other information.
The fact is these sort of close encounters are routine. (complete bullshit, they don't come within 200 yards making hostile moves on a routine basis-ed.) The claimed radio transmission is suspicious to me. Why? Because it was in English? That is odd, but not as weird as telegraphing an attack on a fully armed set of ships that can sink you faster than you can say "Allah akhbar." If someone really wanted to start a conflict they would actually pull a trigger without any warning. They certainly wouldn't be going "nanny nanny boo boo" over the radio.
Oh, and by the way, if Iran wanted to sink a ship, it has surface to surface Silkworm missiles they can use to sink anything they want in that narrow body of water. (It's called a provocation you fucking inbred -ed.)
ZIP
New Gulf of Tonkin? When will the bombs fall on Iran? It's been long overdue.
Posted by: ISLAMSFORLOSERS | January 07, 2008 at 07:57 PM