The “threatening” incident was as phony as the mobile biological weapons vans in the Iraqi desert

COMMENTARY: The Pretext to War


Painting by: EJ Fitzgerald, "Gulf of Tonkin" Courtesty of: Library of Congress

By James Bamford 01/29/2008
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The problem was, the “threatening” incident was as phony as the mobile biological weapons vans in the Iraqi desert, or the meeting between Mohamed Atta and Saddam Hussein’s intelligence agents in Prague, or the transfer of yellow cake from Niger. Like the pretexts that helped launch the country into war in Iraq, there never were any threats from the Iranian sailors. Worse, the incident was intentionally manufactured by the Pentagon and then dangerously hyped by the White House, Republican candidates, and political pundits into a near-war event.

It’s now clear that the open, unarmed speedboats were never threatening and were of no great concern to the top Navy commander in the Gulf, Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, who said his men were never perturbed. "I didn’t get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats," he said. The Iranian ships had "neither anti-ship missiles nor torpedoes," he said, "and I wouldn’t characterize the posture of the U.S. 5th Fleet as afraid of these small boats . . . We are familiar with their presence; they’re familiar with ours.”

Nor did the Iranian boats make any threats. They simply identified themselves to the U.S. ship, saying, “Coalition warship No. 73 this is an Iranian navy patrol boat." The “threats” were just harassing comments by an unidentified broadcaster on a completely different channel. Even the sound of his voice was different from that of the Iranians, and there was also no background noise that would have been generated by a loud speedboat. “We don’t know for sure where they came from,” Cmdr. Lydia Robertson, spokeswoman for 5th Fleet in Bahrain, finally admitted. “It could have been a shore station.” Nonetheless, the Pentagon decided to deliberately edit the disassociated jibe into the non-threatening actions of the Iranian boats, thereby turning an innocent action into a potential act of war.

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But what hasn’t changed is a desire by presidents for far off wars, and a dangerous need to invent pretexts to justify them.

James Bamford is the author, most recently, of "A Pretext For War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies." He is also the author of "The Puzzle Palace" and "Body of Secrets," both about the National Security Agency

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to test their defense systems.

I had a professor in college that worked for the DIA (Russian language analyst) and once a year he was required to fly in some old fighter right up to the Russian border. They did it to us as well. One time the Russians fucked up got it mixed up with a Korean Airlines and shot it down as it actually entered Soviet air space.

Iranian buzzing our guys is exactly the same thing and they knew exactly when they had to break it off.

I have seen guys talk about this before laughing how close these guys came to getting air conditioned.

If you noticed the military guys giving the briefing on the Iranian boats afterwards you could detect (I think) an effort by the Navy briefer not to break into a laugh when describing the danger they were in.