Slashdot Mirror
Tensions Over Hormuz Raise Ugly Possibilities For War
Hugh Pickens writes "The high stakes standoff between Iran and the U.S. over the Strait of Hormuz, the passageway for one-fifth of the world's oil, escalated this week as Iran's navy claimed to have recorded video of a U.S. aircraft carrier entering the Port of Oman and the deputy chief of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Hossein Salami rejected U.S. claims that it could prevent Iran from closing the strait. To drive the point home, Iran has started a 10-day naval exercise in the Persian Gulf to show off how it could use small speedboats and a barrage of missiles to combat America's naval armada while in a report for the Naval War College, U.S. Navy Commander Daniel Dolan wrote that Iran has acquired 'thousands of sea mines, wake homing torpedoes, hundreds of advanced cruise missiles (PDF) and possibly more than one thousand small Fast Attack Craft and Fast Inshore Attack Craft.'" (Read more, below.)
Hugh Pickens continues: "The heart of the Iran's arsenal is its 200 small potential-suicide boats — fiberglass motorboats with a heavy machine gun, a multiple rocket-launcher, or a mine — and may also carry heavy explosives, rigged to ram and blow a hole in the hull of a larger ship. These boats will likely employ a strategy of 'swarming' — coming out of nowhere to ambush merchant convoys and American warships in narrow shipping lanes. But the U.S. Navy is not defenseless against kamikaze warfare. The U.S. has put more machine guns and 25-millimeter gyro-stabilized guns on the decks of warships, modified the 5-inch gun to make it more capable of dealing with high-speed boats, and improved the sensor suite of the Aegis computer-integrated combat system aboard destroyers and cruisers. 'We have been preparing for it for a number of years with changes in training and equipment,' says Vice Admiral (ret.) Kevin Cosgriff, former commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command."
regardless of THERE losses
For fuck's sake. LEARN THE FUCKING PRONOUNS!
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Puhleeeze, let go of that fucking Mossadegh!
It was the Cold War, both the US and the USSR conducted thousands of secret operations all over the world. The simple fact that operation Ajax was a viable proposition means Iran wasn't a stable democracy.
Countries like those of Eastern Europe got fucked much harder than Iran, they were invaded militarily and kept in submission for fifty years, yet they are recovering. Why cannot Iran forget Mossadegh? Or, rather, why cannot the childish American leftists forget him?
"Bush is taking us to war with Iraq". those libs and protestors were always going on and on about this.
Well, we never did. We had a short, brief kinetic contingency operation.
Cheney said we would be greeted as liberators - we were.
Rumsfeld said it wouldn't be a big deal - it wasn't.
John McCain said it wouldn't take very long or cost very much - it didn't.