Trita Parsi has an article in the LA Times with the title (which he didn't write) of "Iran's growing bluster spells danger."
After reading it, I have to wonder, who is really blustering and spelling danger to whom? Isn't the US the side which regularly threatens to bomb Iran? And how is Iran the "threat" when the US has its battleships parked off of the Iranian coastline, nevermind the repeated reports of how the US has authorized secret and clandestine operations against Iran?
Everyone remember how in 1988 the US Navy shot down their civilian airliners, inside their airspace, and while the US Navy ship was inside their waters (something the US Navy lied about for 4 years until Newsweek/Nightline exposed it.) And everyone remember the "Filipino Monkey" incident in which some random anonymous message sent on VHF radio by a prankster in the Persian Gulf was attributed to Iran and deliberately exaggerated by releasing a video onto which the US had superimposed the separate audio recording? (Iran video here, USN video here) when in fact the "Filipino Monkey" prank is decades old and so any US Navy officer would have known better than to automatically attribute it to Iran? As Scott McLeod concluded about this incident:
If "Filipino Monkey" or somebody of that ilk turns out to be the culprit, it means that the Pentagon either can't tell the difference between a prank and a threat, or that it's too busy confronting Iran to bother trying to do so. Either way, it's another reason to worry.
So the real worry and 'spelling danger' should not automatically attributed to Iran acting 'adventurously,' but is in that the US is perfectly willing and capable to fake-up a pretext which the media then accepts and promotes uncritically and at face value.
Nor is this sort of thing particularly new. According to the Newsweek/Nightline article, the USS Vincennes shot down the Iranian airliner as part of a 'secret war' in which the US Navy was attempting to provoke and draw out an Iranian attack in order to justify military aggression against Iran. And we now know that the US war in Vietnam was based on precisely such a manufactured event, known as the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which the US lied about a non-existent North Vietnamese 'second attack' on a US naval vessel.
So, all in all, who is the 'adventurous' threat here? Iran or the US?
All this talk about how Iran is the threat in the Persian Gulf seems to me to be a build-up to yet another "Gulf of Tonkin incident"
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