Monday, January 7, 2008

Coming At You

The Pentagon reported today that Iranian navy fastboats, possibly operated by the Revolutionary Guards, engaged in threatening high-speed runs towards American navy vessels, dropping boxes in the water ahead of the US ships and radio-ing threatening messages. According to an unnamed official, the Iranian boats pulled off at the very instant the American ships were preparing to open fire in self-defense:

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."

There are four possibilities here. The first is that the boats were testing American rules of engagement to gather intelligence in the event of unannounced hostilities. The second is that the Iranians were intentionally trying to provoke an incident. The third is that this was a group of rogue Revolutionary Guardsmen engaged in a hazing ritual to welcome a new crewmember on board. And the fourth is that Dick Cheney is not the craziest person on either side of this conflict.

In any event, episodes like this one really show the wisdom of opening up channels of communication with Tehran. As a French foreign policy eminence who I interviewed for an upcoming article put it, foreign policy was invented to deal with enemies as much as friends. We managed to maintain diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union not just despite the fact that they were our sworn enemies and had thousands of warheads aimed at us for forty-plus years, but because of it. The same seems valid for Iran, which poses nothing close to that kind of threat.

But since fullscale diplomatic relations can't be rushed, the least we should have in place is an "incident at sea" agreement, as Kaveh Afrasiabi pointed out a few weeks ago. The Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf are high-traffic waterways, where accidents and misunderstandings can easily take place even in the absence of hotheaded crazies playing games of chicken with their speedboats. Some sort of naval hotline could help to defuse or limit such an incident in the future, which could mean the difference between an incident and a war.

Posted by Judah in:  Iran   

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