Iran has announced that it is moving warships to the U.S. border. What on earth are they thinking?
On February 8th, 2014 the Fars news agency quoted Admiral Afshin Rezayee Haddad of the Iranian navy as saying:
Iran’s military fleet is approaching the United States’ maritime borders, and this move has a message.
The message of course being that Iran is not going down without a fight. But where in the heck did that come from? What on earth is Iran thinking? Most Americans are going to interpret this in the worst way possible, and it doesn’t help that the mainstream media outlets are covering the story with little or no context. At best they’re framing Iran’s moves as merely a response to U.S. naval deployments near Iran’s own coastlines. This essentially amounts to lying by omission.
The obvious first layer of back-story for anyone paying attention (which the mainstream media hopes that you aren’t) is the collapse sabotage of the Iranian nuclear energy negotiations.
The negotiations over Iran’s nuclear energy program and the possibility of reaching a concrete agreement to insure that Iran does not someday decide to build a nuclear weapon was doomed from the start because it was based on a completely false pretense. Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. It has not even made a decision to seek such technology, and the CIA and Mossad have both made public statements confirming this. The talks pretended to address an accusation that the United States and its allies know full well is a lie, and if the negotiations had resulted in an actual agreement NATO powers would have lost their main line of rationalization for their incessant saber rattling with Iran. They weren’t about to let that happen, but they had to maintain appearances. After all the U.S. couldn’t be seen as rejecting a reasonable deal that actually made their military options impossible to whitewash.
So the deal had to be scuttled, but in such a way that didn’t draw too much attention to the culprits. As is becoming a pattern in this game France played a key support role by taking a hardline approach and reportedly rejecting a proposal that the other Western powers had placed on the table. This while the U.S. congress muddied the waters even more by proposing new, tougher sanctions on Iran while the negotiations were still in progress. The Obama administration made public statements condemning the move by congress saying that it would lead to war with Iran, but this was just an example of the good cop bad cop technique. The damage was done while still allowing the White House to come off as reasonable. Make no mistake though, those who control Obama want war with Iran. They don’t want a political solution.
This was further illustrated by the fact that Iran’s invitation to the Syrian peace talks in Geneva was rescinded in January of this year, another move that can only be interpreted as sabotage since Iran and Syria have a mutual defense agreement, and the U.S. and its allies have been funding and arming militant extremists in their attempt to topple the Syrian government.
Occasionally the powers that be come right out and tell us how they really want this to go down (see videos below). Everything else is just public relations.
The Iranians have no reason to trust the U.S. government and every reason to take the threat of military action against them seriously. So in that context moving warships to the U.S. border is understandable in a way, even if it’s a very bad idea. In a direct military confrontation with the United States Iran’s conventional military wouldn’t last very long at all and it’s highly unwise to pull out a weapon if you don’t intend to use it. Hopefully cool heads will prevail.
Sources
Why the Iranian talks fell apart: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/world/middleeast/iran-and-western-powe…
Iran excluded from the Syrian peace talks: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/21/world/europe/syria-geneva-talks/
Iran warships sailing to U.S. border: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/08/us-iran-usa-navy-idUSBREA170VA…
CIA and Mossad both say the Iran hasn’t even made the decision to seek a nuclear weapon: http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/mossad-cia-agree-iran-has-…
(Via SCG News)
(Photo: REUTERS)