The REAL reason the sixth fleet is in the Gulf

King George is egging for a fight. He wants to make sure we are at war with Iran and the whole Middle East before he leaves office.

I hope Juan is wrong. The US fleet was surrounded and threatened by Iran today. They have no Navy, so they threatened to blow themselves up. Wack-os are tough to beat.

Excuse my sarcasm, but I do not think I am way off base on this. I do feel President Bush with his agendaof trying to make the country and the world see that he still matters, is going out of his way at poking at the bear hoping to cause some sort of reaction. Now being that religious zealots with no conscious lead Iran government, the reaction he will eventually get will take down the path of another World War.

No Juan. He would like to be credited with bringing peace between Israel and the Arabs and Palestinians, but due to the Arab mindset of "What can the American's do for us?" probably nothing will get done.
Perhaps they could be asking "How can we help to ensure peace sticks?" But they are not.
Personally, I think the Iranian speedboats should have been sunk. I believe there are enough guns on the Naval ship to have taken out the speedboats. Once that happens, there will probably be other hostile exchanges of gunfire.

I doubt that GWB wants a world war. Iran is the aggressor. We can quibble over whether a speedboat that claims to have high explosives aboard should be taken at face value or not, but potentially, there might be another quasi-USS Cole type of event.

I've been through the straits on a Navy warship before... it was pretty scarey and that was in 1994. I have no doubt that our skipper would have blown those Iranian gunboats out of the water...even back then. He took no crap from anyone. I am very surprised at the restraint on the commanding officers of those ships. They had to be pooping bricks on the bridge when this was happening and trying to protect their ship without provoking another war in the Middle East.

I can only imagine if those white cartons were mines or explosives. They were testing us and measuring our response time and seeing what we would do. They tested us like they tested the resolve of the Brits when they took their sailors hostage.

The international waters there are very small. We looked up on the banks and saw missle launchers. It's so narrow and a large ship cannot turn or maneuver and is pretty much a sitting duck. We were at battle stations for the entire transit.

If Iran wants to provoke us or make us look bad and lose face to the rest of the world, then the Straits of Hormuz is a great place to do it.

Humorously, I saw where somone asked if Hormuz was the Farsi word for Tonkin?

WHO is invoking WHOM??

We might do a little bit of "provokiing too if Iran sat some 7500 miles away from us (for over a year) and had sent a whole fully-armed armada into the Mexican Gulf just off our coast.

Or their Vice President actually flew out to an aircraft carrier that was part of that Iranian armada, and threatened, from the flight deck, to have Iran massively attack the US.

I'm sorry, but some of you crack me up with your blind arrogance and naivete.

Those ships are there for one purpose and only one purpose. To antaganize Iran into taking the first shot. Nothing would please Bush more than to have some Iran boat loaded with explosives sink one of our ships with all hands aboard. It would be his excuse to dump a lot of munitiions on Iran as he has been frothing at the bit to do for the last year or so.

If Bush wanted peace the fleet would not be there. He would not have claimed that Iran had a Nuke program and WMDs. He could not make it stick that Iran was helping the insurgants in Iraq and he could not make his other claims stick.

Now Iran has a mutual defence treaty with China and Russia and still he leaves the fleet there in hopes of an incident.

IF China gets a fleet. IF is the biggest little word in the dictonary. You don't move a battle group or two half way around the world on an IF.

You're basically right Marty, and the practice has gone on for over a hundred years around the globe to one extent or another.

I agree with Matt, this was some sort of test, to see what sort of response we would take. Perhaps next time the boats will be loaded up with explosives and too much restraint might lead to more of our men and women being killed.

Let us hope that there won't be a next time.

good article