The most sensible comment I've seen on the so-called recent confrontation in the Gulf of Hormuz is this by A. J. Rossmiller on Americablog:
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.
Given that no one has identified the source of the threatening sound byte that was added to the video, it seems that a threatening mountain has been created out of a perfectly ordinary molehill. Fortunately, the public is increasingly skeptical of the administration that cried wolf.
--the BB
