Iran has taken two small U.S. Navy craft into custody and detained 10 American sailors. Iranian authorities say the boats intruded a mile into Iran’s territorial waters. U.S. officials say the riverine craft were in transit from Kuwait to Bahrain when one of them encountered mechanical trouble and innocently drifted into Iranian waters, according to a Pentagon spokesperson.
The incident prompted Secretary of State John Kerry to leave a meeting and phone Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to negotiate the sailors’ release. The two men have a cordial relationship after months of negotiating the pact that will curtail Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. That pact is expected to be implemented in a few days. Helene Cooper reports:
The Pentagon said they had been on a routine training mission, but those waters are a frequent location for intelligence collection by the United States, Iran and many Gulf countries. A senior military official said he expected the sailors to remain held overnight and be released on Wednesday.
The detention of the 10 sailors comes at a particularly delicate moment in the tense American-Iranian relationship, just days before the formal implementation of a nuclear deal in which the United States is supposed to unfreeze about $100 billion in Iranian assets in return for the disablement of critical nuclear facilities. [...]
The semiofficial Fars news agency in Iran said that the boats had illegally traveled more than a mile into Iranian territorial waters near Farsi Island, in the Persian Gulf, which is the home of a major Iranian naval base. It said that forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Navy had confiscated GPS equipment, which would “prove that the American ships where ‘snooping’ around in Iranian waters.”
In 2007, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Navy captured 15 British military personnel and held them for 13 days for what Tehran said was an intrusion into Iranian territorial waters.
Republican Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado called for President Obama to delay his State of the Union address until Congress could be briefed. "I think the White House needs to be honest and transparent as quickly as possible with the members of the Congress, the House and the Senate — perhaps that even means a delay to the start of the State of the Union tonight to talk about exactly what happened," Gardner told CNN.
Other Republicans spouted off, too. From CNN:
"This kind of openly hostile action is not surprising. It's exactly what I and so many others predicted when President Obama was negotiating the nuclear deal with Iran -- that it would embolden their aggression towards the United States and our allies in the region," Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton told Blitzer on "The Situation Room." [...]
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, another 2016 Republican presidential candidate, also criticized Obama and the nuclear deal.
"Iran is testing the boundaries of this administrations resolve and everybody knows the boundaries are pretty wide and the administration is willing to let them get away with many things. You'll only see this accelerate since the deal was signed with Iran," he said. "That's why as president on my first day in office I will repeal the nuclear deal that Barack Obama has signed with Iran."
Cotton’s comment indicates once again how little he understands. Farsi island is base for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which is filled with hard-liners who opposed the nuclear deal and who have made attempts to scuttle it despite the support it received from Supreme Leader Sayyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei.
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gjohnsit has a post on this subject here.