Tunnel Vision in the Strait of Hormuz

Trying to persuade an audience in Nashville, Tennessee, that Saddam Hussein had already fooled the world once about his intentions regarding weapons of mass destruction, George W. Bush issued one of his most memorable malapropisms:

"Fool me once, shame... shame on... you (long, uncomfortable silence). Fool me... can't get fooled again!"

Maybe so, but the American public has shown a surprisingly high tolerance for being fooled repeatedly, as if it were impossible for the Bush Administration to cry wolf too many times. Even though the United States had just invaded Iraq on the false premise that its weapons of mass destruction were a threat to the region and the world, resulting in one of the worst foreign policy mistakes of this generation, the US government has spent the last three years building a case against neighboring Iran based on (you guessed correctly) its threatening nuclear weapons program. The American public and, most importantly, the chattering classes and the foreign policy "experts," believed them once again. The only real disagreement, given the damaged state of national hubris in the wake of the Iraq fiasco, was whether anything at all could be done about it.

Last December, the National Intelligence Estimate stated "with high confidence" that Iran had halted its efforts to develop a nuclear weapons' program back in 2003. Bush had been notified of this for some months, but nevertheless dialed up his anti-Iran rhetoric. Perhaps he put the report in the same to-read-later pile as the "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the US" memo.

One month later, some Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz allegedly brought us to the brink of World War Three. Five Iranian patrol boats had approached three US Navy warships. In one of the radio transmissions, a threatening message was picked up: "We are coming at you. You will explode in a few minutes." The US ships said they were about to fire when the patrol boats retreated. Both the United States and Iran decided to broadcast their own version of the event, with the Iranian government saying that it had been a routine mission of reconnaissance and that there had not been any hostility. Asked yesterday which propaganda he believed most, Fareed Zakaria, one of the better-reputed foreign policy pundits, repeated his own past mistakes by acknowledging he believed the American version, but that the Iranians had a reason to be jumpy and aggressive. In an attempt to justify the decision to get ready to fire on the small speedboats, which typically are only crewed by 2-3 people and should pose no threat to US warships, mentions of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole abounded. Many sources within the Pentagon have now begun to retract, venturing that the hostile message was probably issued by a locally famous radio heckler known as the Filipino Monkey. The sound and tone of the voice sounds different than that of the Iranian officer, and lacks a Persian accent. According to the Navy Times, these kinds of things happen frequently, and especially in the Strait of Hormuz.

For Americans, this incident evoked memories of the USS Cole and the death of 17 American sailors. This attack was allegedly carried out by Al Qaeda -although a recent judicial ruling in the US makes the Sudanese government responsible- and took place in a Yemeni port. Iranians and others in the Muslim world, however, are likely to draw different comparisons and historical analogies. They will probably say -and they are right- that the Strait of Hormuz is within territorial waters of Iran and Oman, and that the US warships have been patrolling it for decades. They might remember that a year ago, a US nuclear submarine accidentally struck a huge Japanese oil tanker, risking disaster. They will surely point out, and this incident is almost never brought up in the US media, that in 1988 a US warship mistakenly shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, killing all 290 passengers over Iranian territorial waters. The US government said that an inexperienced crew mistook the Airbus 300 for an F-14 Tomcat fighter, but I doubt anyone in Iran believes that. After all, only three months before that, the United States had sank two Iranian warships and six speedboats in what was called Operation Praying Mantis.

And it all happened in the Strait of Hormuz, involving US warships. Remember the USS Cole? How about remembering Gulf of Tonkin?