Iran confrontation: all smoke, no fire

There's been extensive discussion about the "confrontation" between US and Iranian navies in the Persian Gulf last week, and I've refrained from commenting thus far because the details have been murky, at best. I was suspicious of the initial furor simply because routine contact between "opposing" ships happens *all the time* in the Gulf, and this really doesn't seem like it was anything unusual. It's just that it sound like a big deal when you don't know it's a common occurrence. Despite hyperventilating initial reports, it turned out that US government accounts were exaggerated, the US officers didn't think it was a big deal at the time, and the US tape was likely not an accurate portrayal of the incident. Pretty disgraceful, not to mention misleading.

The comparison to the USS Cole is one that I've been hearing a lot, but it's not really a helpful analogy, and here's why: the Cole attack was carried out by terrorists, i.e., there was nobody for us to hit back against. Were an Iranian navy ship to suddenly decide to randomly carry out a suicide attack against a US ship, we'd bomb Iran back to the stone age, and of course they know that. There's absolutely *no* incentive for them to do such a thing, which is why we can coexist all the time in the Gulf with their ships. Iran is absolutely not going to attack us (at least not openly) because they're a state, not a terrorist organization. So while they *could* have done something to the ship, it's so extraordinarily unlikely that to hype it like it was a close call or something seems pretty disingenuous of the administration.