Gulf of Tonkin Redux?

Why would Iranian officials be this stupid?

Do they want to give the Bush administration a reason?

Why would they want to play chicken with a mad man like Cheney or Bush or the cabal of NeoCons surrounding them?

Why?

The author is right. Something smells to high heaven about this.

CNN was reporting this so breathlessly one would have thought that L.A. had been nuked.

Everyone needs to calm down. Harassment is not a reason for WWIII

Strait Of Hormuz Incident: This Time, Let's Be Sure We Know What Really Happened

By Manifesto Joe

I am part of a generation that woke up one day, around 19 years old, and heard that the Vietnam War was actually over. It hit me that I could barely remember a time when there hadn't been a Vietnam War -- it had seemed so permanent. This is one of the reasons that the breaking news about the reported incident in the Strait of Hormuz evokes specters of the '60s and early '70s.

The early reports are like this one from The Associated Press. And, they sound ominously like the first accounts of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident:

In what is being called a serious provocation, Iranian Revolutionary Guard harassed and provoked three U.S. Navy ships in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, officials said Monday.

U.S. forces were on the verge of firing on the Iranian boats in the early Sunday incident, when the boats ended the incident and turned and moved away, said a Pentagon official.

"It is the most serious provocation of this sort that we've seen yet," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

Pardon me for being so mistrustful, but I've got a problem with this coming from an anonymous Pentagon source, broken to the MSM after they mulled over it for more than 24 hours. I was born, but not yesterday. I grew up watching the CBS evening body-bag news, long after what is now generally acknowledged as a manufactured incident.

It's far too early to know exactly what happened. In the case of the Gulf of Tonkin, it took many years to ferret out the facts. But it's been obvious for a while that this "administration" is far from averse to expanding Mideast warfare to include Iran. So, there's more than a little reason for doubt.

AP reported that the anonymous official said that:

"... he didn't have the precise transcript of communications that passed between the two forces, but the Iranians radioed something to the effect that "we're coming at you and you'll explode in a couple minutes."

Wait a minute. Transcript? Were the U.S. ships recording this? Let's hear it. By definition, a transcript has been, you know, transcribed, as in a human reproduction. You know what those humans can be like sometimes.

The AP report also mentioned something about tensions between Washington and Tehran heightening over U.S. allegations that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. There was absolutely no mention in the same report of how those allegations have been generally discredited by the National Intelligence Estimate. It's the MSM stenographers with amnesia, at work yet again.

This whole thing seems to smell. Let's ask a lot of questions and wait for hard facts to become available. I've already awakened once in my life, just shy of 19, to hear that a war that seemed to go on forever was finally over. If we actually got into one of those things with Iran, that day of awakening might finally come when I'm living at Peaceful Meadows Campus of Care.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


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