IRGC boats almost fired upon by USN

[Straha]

Also, there's a major power-struggle going on inside Iran and a serious confrontation with the USA is just what some elements of that power struggle need to put their opponents away. I'd guess that was the primary driver of this incident.

The other is, drop dummy packages in front of the ships often enough and they might get ignored when somebody drops a real one.

Could you tell us more about this power struggle? I'm guessing its between the hard-liners and reformists? Who's on which side and controls what would be helpful to know.

To give as brief as possible origin of the power struggle you have to go back to the Iranian Revolution. To make a really really really complex situation simple the Iranian Revolution was, primarily, a liberal westernizing revolutionary movement. The mainstay of the people who were marching were people who wanted a democracy in form or another as the end result. The problem with the revolution was that the Iranian liberals were about as disunited as you could possibly be partially because of heavy repression of communists and suspected communists, partly due to a lack of real historical democracy in Iran and a variety of other reasons which should only be brought in an obscure debate between drunken Poli. Sci grad students at a bar.

What united the revolutionary movement was the Shi'a Clerics who opposed the Shah's regime for a huge variety of reasons and who had a massive power base both in the provinces and in the inner workings of the Shah's government (Why? you ask. One of the Shah's major accomplishments in the 60s was a massive university enlistment program that drew people from families who had previously only studied at seminaries or with a Mullah priest. And to paraphrase a common saying, you can take the Fundamentalist out of his mosque, but you cannot take the Mosque out of the Fundamentalist.) This was further helped by the fact the only man who had massive charismatic appeal to the people was Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini became the touchstone of the entire revolution and everything revolved around him and his clerical supporters and he became the real executive power in Iran.

Fast forward to the end of the revolution and the drafting of the new constitution. Because Khomeini is the touchstone he's able to pull strings and politic. The liberal "westerners" draft the rough draft of the constitution but Khomeini is able to pull it so that the final draft of the constitution gets overhauled by a body clerics first. Two major things come out of this revision: 1. A Guardian Council of Clerics who get final say over legislation coming out of the Iranian Parliament and 2. The office of Supreme Leader who has final say over pretty all elected posts in Iran, is Head of State and wields an incredible amount of power. The office is, essentially, hand tailored for Khomeini. And he's a perfect fit. He's probably the only man who could hold the country together as it tries to overhaul during the revolution.

Needless to say the liberals are not happy about this. However nobody expects it to last like this. And odds are it probably wouldn't have if it hadn't for Iraq pouring across the border. Because I've been too verbose already I'll summarize even more (and I want to get this out before the server reset). Khomeini and the Clerical elite around him rally the country in a millenary revolutionary fervour directed not only against Iraq but towards uniting all Shia in the Middle East (with massive massive repercussions which we still feel acutely to this day.) In the process he pushes out most of the other forces that were left in Iran and by the end of the 80s only the clerics are left with the lynch pin of the operation being Khomeini's incredible personal charisma and power and the xenophobic and messianic (literally, there were large groups of people who viewed Khomeini as the Messiah Twelfth Imam of Shia Islam and referred to him publicly as such) popular support he has accrued. And that's where the problem comes in. Khomeini is old, he was born in 1900, and by the end the Clerics can see the writing on the wall. The post of Supreme is tailor made specifically for him and nobody can fill his shoes, much less his incredible political acumen.

To make matters even worse there's no clear successor anywhere. Khomeini was a very very widely respected Grand Ayatollah before the revolution. He had a unique list of credentials both political and religious which would fill pages. Key word: unique. When he's going there's no one left who can successfully fill the dualistic nature of Supreme Leader in being both the uniting force of the Clergy and the Politicians. To make matters even worse for the clerics in charge the one man who had been, sort of, groomed as a successor to Khomeini was stripped of all political power and sidelined about two or three years before Khomeini's death. So the clerics do what they do best and improvise. Quick backstory: During the Iran-Iraq War there were three major posts in the Iranian Government. Speaker of Parliament, President and Supreme Leader. There was another post, Prime Minister, which could have been a source of contention if it had been filled by a talented man. What ended up happening was that after a brief set of squabbles Khomeini stepped in and put someone he hand picked there. And the speaker of Parliament and President were filled by Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ali Khameini respectively, both middle ranking conservative clergy who had made their bones as politicians with a very pragmatic bend (Khameini being more conservative than Rasfanjani.) Back to the main portion. The clergy, improvising, revised the constitution. They removed the post Prime Minister altogether and entrenched the power of the Supreme Leader and the Guardian Council and made the President much more powerful stripping some power from the Speaker of Parliament. Then they made Khameini a Grand Ayatollah (something he no religious right to be) and waited until Khomeini died.

The idea seemed to be this: The Power of the Clergy was fading, so they entrenched themselves and assured themselves of at least eight years of dominance (the term limit for President) in which they could work out a new solution without Khomeini. All of the liberals and people who favoured western style democracy noticed this immediately and started circling for the kill. Khameini and the Clerics in charge had nothing near the following Khomeini had and it was viewed as inevitable that eventually the post of Supreme Leader would be sidelined constitutionally, pragmatically, or whatever way. Rafsanjani had real power but only because he knew where all the eggs lied in the political game, he could make Parliament and all the politicians dance to whatever tune he called but he did not have overwhelming support of the people or the clergy. It becomes common wisdom that eventually a much more western style of democracy will reign supreme in Iran.

Things progress down this path and it gets to the point in the late 90s where even control of the Revolutionary Guard has slipped from beyond the Clerics hands (there were internal pro-democratic riots in part of Iran, the Clerics called out the Revolutionary to put it down and the Guard told them "We think you should listen to the rioters.") and the Supreme is relying on an essentially Paramilitary organization for actual enforcement power (the Basiji.) And in 1997, when Rafsanjani is no longer able to be President, it looks like predictions have come true. Mohammad Khatami a liberal cleric is elected to the presidency with popular support and is soon reinforced by a liberal majority election in Parliament and pro-free press and liberalizing reforms start to be introduced. Among them are overtures to the United States to have an exchange of high culture (which are promptly ignored thanks in no small part to Monica Lewinski.) The conservatives panic. To stop this they pull a lame duck last day session the conservative parliamentary majority (Parliamentary elections are held before Presidential Elections in Iran so that the majority Liberal parliament would only come in about two or three years [I can't remember off the top of my head at 6:30 in the morning] into Khatami's tenure in office) and repeal a number of Khatami's liberalizations, pass news laws on a variety of subjects and then re-interpret the Guardian Council and Expediency Council so that they can veto all legislation before it gets passed.

Needless to say the reform movement whithers in its tracks and never comes back (it's really a sad thing, if you read the interviews with these people you can't help but feel incredibly sympathy for them because they've been through horrible ordeals and finally got the chance to change Iran for the better only to have jerked away at, literally, the last minute.) The clergy and the conservative forces in Iran make a pact to hold power as long as they can because they saw their life flash before their eyes already and they don't want to have it happen again. In the next rounds of elections the Guardian Council essentially purge the candidate list for Parliament of all major reformists (as is their constitutional right to do) and then approve presidential candidates who are destined to split the liberal vote allowing conservatives or Rafsanjani (who can run again and who is more palatable then anyone else in their eyes) to win the popular vote. What ends up happening is that the man we know and love today Ahmadinejad, a conservative demagogue leading a popular backlash against the perceived liberal impotence to change anything, comes in second in the first round of elections to Rafsanjani. The clerics then decide that they'd rather go with the conservative demagogue who will need to rely on them to accomplish anything than Rafsanjani who still has some political power left in his hands and mobilize everyone they can in tactics which have had their legitimacy and legality questioned publicly by a number of Iranian Governmental insiders.

And that brings us to where we are today. The conservative Clerics main source of popular support to back up their political are their control of the Basiji Paramilitary thugs and the xenophobic reaction that drives people to them and their Khomeinist line. You have a man like Ahmadinejad, who no one likes (a friend of mine from Tehran, where Ahmadinejad was Mayor, regaled with stories of the anti-Ahmadinejad sentiment that was present before he left Iran) in power because he could appeal to popular support and that provided a vital necessity that the clerics needed to protect their power. The problem there is that he's squandered his support in his international brinkmanship and his utter failure to reform anything domestically. You have moderates like Rafsanjani who want to reform the system but leave it so it still resembles the Iran of today in most ways. You have liberals who want to open up Iran and liberalize most of the restrictions imposed on the people and press. On top of that since the mid-90s riots the Revolutionary Guard has been brought into the same bed as the Clerics and given all sorts of economic and political boons. They represent a whole other, and much more secretive but nationalistic, player in Iranian politics. And even more bit players.


And that's the short story of Iranian power politics and its history.

Wow I went on for much longer than I planned. I'm sorry if some of this reads poorly, it's almost 7 AM and I haven't slept yet. I'll come through and revise this tomorrow (I think I caught most of the egregious mistakes just now.)

[The Spartan]

Straha would you mind if I saved your description of Iranian politics?

A summary like that would be useful to have in the back of my mind (since it's not practical to carry it with me) when arguing with people over how we should handle Iran and just how little we can trust Captain Chucklefuck with his constant rhetoric.

Which seems to me to be almost exactly the opposite of what he should be doing. That's a crude way of putting it but I think Stuart expressed my sentiment already far more coherently than I can.

[CJvR]

So having sealed off the safety valves the Ayatollahs are waiting for the boiler to blow. Lets hope we don't have to wait to long the world would be a much better place without them.

[Pablo Sanchez]

WaPo reports that it didn't actually happen in at all the way the Navy initially reported it. To whit, the objects dropped by the boats were immediately determined to pose no threat whatsoever to the Port Royal and her group, the threatening transmission has been determined by experts to have been made by an unknown party who was merely impersonating an Iranian (badly), and the confrontation was far less serious than other incidents that had previously gone unreported. The described incidents with the USS Whidbey Island and USS Carr, which involved warning shots and warning blasts on the ship's whistle, respectively, became news only after last Sunday's incident (or rather, after the lack of press and public interest in the story), in spite of apparently being more serious.

But hey, it's not like the administration has a history of distortion and exaggeration aimed at creating casus belli out of nothing.

[Straha]

So having sealed off the safety valves the Ayatollahs are waiting for the boiler to blow. Lets hope we don't have to wait to long the world would be a much better place without them.

Not necessarily. The logic seems to be that eventually the drive for liberalization and reform will die out and that eventually the status quo can be accepted. If the xenophobic mentality of the people can be maintained it helps play into this plan. The clerics look like the only people who can keep Iran from falling under to the foreigners who surround them everywhere, as they have for thirty years, and the people will, hopefully, accept them if only grudgingly.

Straha would you mind if I saved your description of Iranian politics?

Not at all, I'm flattered that you ask. But keep in mind it's not the most detailed description possible. I'll revise it a bit later to flesh out parts I skimmed over and to make it read better.

[MKSheppard]

'Filipino Monkey' may be behind radio threat in Gulf

By ANDREW SCUTRO and DAVID BROWN
Navy Times
The threatening radio transmission heard at the end of a video showing harassing maneuvers by Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz may have come not from the Iranian crews, but from a locally famous heckler known among ship drivers as the "Filipino Monkey."

Since the Jan. 6 incident was announced to the public a day later, the U.S. Navy has said it's unclear where the voice came from. In the videotape released by the Pentagon on Jan. 8, the screen goes black at the very end and the voice can be heard, distancing it from the scenes on the water.

"We don't know for sure where they came from," said Cmdr. Lydia Robertson, spokeswoman for 5th Fleet in Bahrain. "It could have been a shore station."

While the threat — "I am coming to you. You will explode in a few minutes" — was picked up during the incident, further jacking up the tension, there's no proof yet of its origin. And several Navy officials have said it's difficult to figure out who's talking.

"Based on my experience operating in that part of the world, where there is a lot of maritime activity, trying to discern (who is speaking on the radio channel) is very hard to do," Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead, a former Hawai'i-based U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, told Navy Times during a brief telephone interview Friday.

Indeed, the voice in the audio sounds different from the one belonging to an Iranian officer shown speaking to the cruiser Port Royal over a radio from a small open boat in the video released by Iranian authorities. He is shown in a radio exchange at one point asking the U.S. warship to change from the common bridge-to-bridge channel 16 to another channel, perhaps to speak to the Navy without being interrupted.

Further, there's none of the background noise in the audio released by the U.S. that would have been picked up by a radio handset in an open boat.

So with Navy officials unsure and the Iranians accusing the U.S. of fabrications, whose voice was it? In recent years, American ships operating in the Middle East have had to contend with a mysterious but profane voice known as the "Filipino Monkey," likely more than one person, who listens in on ship-to-ship radio traffic and then jumps on the net shouting insults and jabbering vile epithets.

Navy women — a helicopter pilot hailing a tanker, for example — who are overheard on the radio are said to suffer particularly degrading treatment.

Several Navy ship drivers interviewed by Navy Times are raising the possibility that the Monkey, or an imitator, was indeed featured in that video.

Rick Hoffman, a retired captain who commanded the cruiser Hue City and spent many of his 17 years at sea in the Gulf was subject to the renegade radio talker repeatedly, often without pause during the so-called "Tanker Wars" of the late 1980s.

"For 25 years there's been this mythical guy out there who, hour after hour, shouts obscenities and threats," he said. "He could be tied up pierside somewhere or he could be on the bridge of a merchant ship."

And the Monkey has stamina.

"He used to go all night long. The guy is crazy," he said. "But who knows how many Filipino Monkeys there are? Could it have been a spurious transmission? Absolutely."

Furthermore, Hoffman said radio signals have a way of traveling long distances in that area. "Under certain weather conditions I could hear Bahrain from the Strait of Hormuz."

Cmdr. Jeff Davis, a Navy spokesman at the Pentagon, could not say if the voice belonged to the heckler.

"It's an international circuit and we've said all along there were other ships and shore stations in the area," he said.

When asked if U.S. officials considered whether the threats came from someone besides the Iranians when releasing the video and audio, Roughead said: "The reason there is audio superimposed over the video is it gives you a better idea of what is happening."

Similarly, Davis said the audio was part of the "totality" of the situation and helped show the "aggressive behavior."

[The Spartan]

Straha would you mind if I saved your description of Iranian politics?

Not at all, I'm flattered that you ask. But keep in mind it's not the most detailed description possible. I'll revise it a bit later to flesh out parts I skimmed over and to make it read better.

I not so worried about it being that detailed. Frankly, the people I'm likely to argue with this about aren't going to actively listen to me long enough for me to hit them with the details, but having a decent summary, which I think your post is, should be sufficient enough. They may still dismiss what I say but it gives me a better chance of getting them to concede that I just might be right. Or at least consider that I might be. Stubborn idiots...

That said, thanks.

[Pablo Sanchez]

Similarly, Davis said the audio was part of the "totality" of the situation and helped show the "aggressive behavior."

Unrelated radio activity from a third party not affiliated in any way with the IRGC or the nation of Iran helped show aggressive behavior on the part of the IRGC? Excuse me if I find this justification laughable.

[Ubiquitous]

This whole episode is looking pretty disgusting. I think it's pretty obvious now that we have been lied to [again].