I spent several years of my early 20’s serving as a line officer at sea on the navigation bridges of several U.S. Navy warships during the Viet Nam War. After I returned to civilian life, and ever since, I’ve maintained more than a passing interest in Naval matters.
Hence, I feel somewhat qualified to call Bullshit! on National Security Advisor, John Bolton’s, idiotic attempt to create panic, as he tries to gin up support for preemptive attack by the U.S. on the Islamic Republic of Iran Bolton is using reports of photographic intelligence that Iran Hawks, like him, want to interpret as indicating plans by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to attack U.S. Navy ships with missiles fired from dhows plying the waters of the Persian Gulf. Dhows, like the vessel pictured above.
To be sure, the term, Dhow, as a vessel type, describes a considerable variety of coastal and seagoing vessels ranging in size from quite small to not particularly large. Many of these trading and fishing boats have one or two masts and lateen rigged sails and almost all have diesel engines. Most hulls are constructed of wood, some of fiberglass. The largest of these craft tend to be smaller than 100’ in length. Perhaps the unsuitability of Dhows as platforms for naval armaments and fire control systems, accounts for the fact that no navy in the world employs such vessels as warships.
Anyway, even if there were something to John Bolton’s night sweat hallucinations, about the Iranian Revolutionary Guard McGyvering civilian dhows to launch missiles against the US Fleet, it wouldn’t make one bit of difference, because it wouldn’t add a smidgen of capability to an Iranian Navy that already bristles with an arsenal of ships, proper military attack boats and submarines armed with launchers and fire control for highly destructive and very effective Chinese and Iranian made antiship cruise missiles.
Anyway, John, loading a missile on a boat does not create a missile boat. Heck, the burning, explosive force, of launching an antiship cruise missile, would destroy most smaller dhows and and severely damage the vessel and crews of larger ones, if a launch could be pulled off at all. This is what an antiship cruise missile launch of a Chinese missile widely used by Iran looks like—
Try that from an open, 50’ wooden boat. I dare you.
Yet American national security apparatus is helping spread crap like this —
WASHINGTON — The intelligence that caused the White House to escalate its warnings about a threat from Iran came from photographs of missiles on small boats in the Persian Gulf that were put on board by Iranian paramilitary forces, three U.S. officials said.
Overhead imagery showed fully assembled missiles, stoking fears that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps would fire them at U.S. naval ships.
Additional pieces of intelligence picked up threats against commercial shipping and potential attacks by Arab militias with Iran ties on Americans on U.S. troops in Iraq.
As military officials struggled to show that the threat from Iran was growing, intelligence officials declassified a photograph of one of the small boats, called dhows, carrying what was described as a functional Iranian missile.
The Pentagon has not released the photograph. On its own, two U.S. officials said, the photograph was not compelling enough to convince the American public and lawmakers, nor foreign allies, of the new Iranian threat.
Maybe, if John Bolton had spent part of the Viet Nam War years gaining experience in one of the military branches, he’d actually know something about how things work, but he spent all of his draft eligible years at Yale, instead, getting a bachelor and law degree, before growing up to be a Neocon GOP, Chickenhawk, warmongering git, and Trump’s National Security Advisor.
John Bolton pulled exactly this same kind of polished turd show when he helped Bush 43 hype nonexistent Iraqi WMDs as justification for deposing Saddam Hussein. Vanity Fair reports this week —
Bolton, of course, has a history of abusing U.S. intelligence to justify his foreign-policy goals. Perhaps most notorious was a May 2002 speech at the Heritage Foundation, in which Bolton, then the State Department’s undersecretary for arms-control issues, accused Cuba of developing biological weapons—an assertion American officials at the time said overstated U.S. intelligence, and which Bolton subsequently tried to repeat to Congress. Later, as the Bush administration made the case for invading Iraq, Bolton helped sell the lie that Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons. “We saw a pattern of Mr. Bolton trying to manipulate intelligence to justify his views,” former deputy secretary of state Tony Blinken recently told The New Yorker when discussing Bolton’s failure to secure Senate confirmation when he was appointed as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. “If it had happened once, maybe. But it came up multiple times, and always it was the same underlying issue: he would stake out a position, and then, if the intelligence didn’t support it, he would try to exaggerate the intelligence and marginalize the officials who had produced it.”
Don’t take solace from reports that Trump wants to move more slowly against Iran than Bolton, Secretary of State Pompeo and the National Security team want to move. That’s just Trump Trumping, which means slathering his BS on all sides of every issue. If you need further evidence that war with Iran is coming, remember that Trump predicted Obama would make war on Iran to secure reelection in 2012. Stupid as Trump is, if he tries to hold back, his fellow morons, Bolton and Pompeo, can probably convince him, easily, that a bully little war with Iran will be just the thing to put his campaign over the top for 2020, just like Iraq helped reelect Bush 43 in 2004.
Expect more bad news on this subject, soon.