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A U.S.-Iran Naval Clash Is Not Inevitable
by Micah Zenko
July 27, 2012
The headline of today’s Washington Post reads, “Iran Expands Ability to Strike U.S. Navy in Gulf.” The piece describes Persian Gulf war games, paranoid comments by regional officials, and hollow threats from Iranian officials.
By now, when an Iranian official threatens the United States, we should call it what it is: ritual. Just yesterday, an anonymous official warned, ”If the Americans’ futile cyber attacks do not stop, it will face a teeth-breaking response.” While novel dental threats might now be part of Iran’s asymmetric defensive strategy, Western media elevates such blustery rhetoric to the headline news, rewarding the Iranian regime with the strategic communications coup that it desperately seeks. As a State Department spokesperson noted last month with refreshing honesty: “The Venezuelans make lots of extravagant claims. So do the Iranians.”
When reading about the U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf or the serial threats from Iran, it is worth keeping two things in mind.
First, as Lieutenant General Ronald Burgess, then-chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), stated in February, “The [DIA] assesses Iran is unlikely to initiate or intentionally provoke a conflict.” In other words, the government of Iran is not looking to start a war with the United States. This is a smart call, given that the Iranian defense budget of $9 billion is less than 2 percent of the U.S. military budget of $553 billion. Iran fared poorly in its clash with the U.S. Navy in April 1988—and it would face a similar fate today.
Read More: http://blogs.cfr.org/zenko/2012/07/27/a-u-s-iran-naval-clash-is-not-inevitable/
