Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Seeds of Inevitability II

The vurld is a very potentially varied thingey. So there is more to the "military confrontation that didn't quite happpen" than has been discussed previously.

If this is a routine military to military non-hostile encounter and the Bush administration insured that this story came out we can interpret the story as an effort to test the waters. Perhaps Bush and Cheney are wondering if this story will stimulate voices to demand war? The provocative story is something of an assessment tool. "How rabid are the American people this week?" and the different but related question of, "What will get them to howl for Iranian blood?"

Oh yes, then there is the angle that by doing these sorts of runs at U.S. convoys the Iranians help keep the price of oil way up. Isn't there some dollar amount that each barrel is costing due to the threat of a war between
Iran and the United States? I think it is from ten to twenty dollars a barrel so it makes oil more valuable and notifies the West that prices would of course be more like $200.00 or more a barrel if there were a significant Persian Gulf War. Keeping prices up now benefits all oil producers. The threat of higher oil prices sounds like bad business to a lot of people. Still, it may be that this is the world we find ourselves in, one where energy is
precious, so precious that we may not get as much of it as we would like.

If worldwide oil supply was significantly disrupted markets would become more regional. I believe regions will favor their own folks first in a situation of genuine scarcity. Others would be forced to pay even higher amounts, or find some emergency source of necessary energy supplies.
new sources of energy or pray to the earth goddess.

The Seed of Inevitability

Why has the recent "confrontation" reported between five motor boats and a large U.S. warship had a feeling of unreality? Well, it just looks sort of funny to see heavily armed U. S. warships being purportedly threatened by these open lightboats.

One indication that this is a fabricated provocation of some sort is the inability of reporting a clear consistent story.

The distances from open boats to U.S. ships have been reported as

If this is a run of the mill confrontation as has been reported then why get excited about it? It has been reported as a typical interaction between these two military forces. Yes we learn this is really just
typical military tactics, even without hostilities.

Such approaches are used to test the enemy response. Iranian boats could have been testing the convoy response to their advance. Perhaps they do this sort of thing regularly.

The Iranian boats found out they could get within 650 feet of the American convoy.

The Iranian manuevers forced the convoy to take evasive manuevers and this is information for the Iranian military, how do they engage is these evasive manuevers and what are they and so on and so forth? It can also be thought of as a sort of harassment or means of increasing United States military costs.

I'm just wondering what would actually be left floating after the commencement of naval hostilities in the
Gulf. After an hour would naval hostilities at least, be essentially decided. The Iranians will have destroyed whatever naval targets they could reach and Iranian naval assets would be reduced to near zero.

Yet then we are told that the incident was really something more than routine. It was a provocation of sorts.
Does that mean some Iranian commander went cowboy? Of course it was all pretty symbolic. No hostilities.

So which is it, boring military manuever for the upteenth time or a big deviation from what is ordinary?

The Iranians reported that the incident was routine. Maybe they will change their story too.

While we wonder about these things we have already accepted something like the idea that conflict between
Iran and the United States is inevitable and so naturally we mistook this routine military event, which we have never heard about before, for something more aggressive.

I wonder how the United States is monitoring Iran at sea and on land. Are we making ourselves a nuisance?
Is what we do as annoying as those damn pt boats or whatever you call them? Is it all routine or prelude to
aggressive war, bombardment and who knows what?

Face it, neither the United States nor Iran are perfect. Still, they can achieve far more working together than by remaining adversaries. I hope that Mr. Bush will not pursue war with Iran. Unfortunately, this whole story sounds too much like a tale told by an idiot to not wonder if that idiot is the one vacationing in sunny
Palestine.