Thoughts on the US Navy/IRGC debacle

Note: these are my thoughts alone and reflect no one else's opinion outside of the voices that live in my head.



I have been miserably sick for the past week, but one thing cut through the fog like a laser beam for me, and that was the taking of the US Navy boat(s)* by the IRGC this past week.  Instantly, I saw CNN (my wife was watching the channel at the time, I was trying not to die of pneumonia) try intensely to spin this as "the US boats were disabled and requesting help".  And instantly I did not buy it.  And every single fact that we have been told since that initial spin has further put the lie to that fabrication.  The Iranians first claimed they had "arrested" the US sailors.  Well, you don't "arrest" someone who is having engine problems.  Second, it was the IRGC that captured them.  They are not the AAA of the Persian Gulf.  These guys are glorified thugs who the Iranian government pretends they have no control over and use to instigate international incidents with.  They're responsible for the murder of US personnel in Iraq, the seizure of a British naval vessel in 2008, and various other acts of international law breaking, and every time, the Iranian government tsks and says "we can't control these guys, what do you expect us to do about it?"  Well, you could start by ceasing funding them, and taking away their arms, but since they're explicitly doing your bidding, I doubt that will ever happen.

I digress.  Bottom line, the IRGC pull stunts like this, and their very involvement make me pre-judge the whole situation.  My best guess is as follows:
1) The US boat(s) were in international waters.
2) The IRGC either disabled them or simply (illegally) seized them, claiming the boats were in Iranian territorial waters (within 12 nm of the Iranian coast).
3) The crew radioed about their situation to the Navy, and were told no assets were within range to defend them and were ordered to surrender.
4) The Iranians seized the sailors, and upon checking their navigational records, saw incontrovertible proof that the boat(s) were indeed in international waters, so they contacted Tehran about what to do.
5) At this point, the Iranian official international story breaks that the boat(s) were in distress and the IRGC had come to rescue them (while their domestic news kept claiming they had "arrested" the sailors).  Because the navigational proof that they believed would back the claim that the US violated Iranian waters was too contrarian to even plausibly lie about.
6) The navigational records (to include GPS positions) will simply never be returned to US custody.  The Iranians dare not do so (as it will prove their act of war/piracy) and the current Administration won't force the issue.
7) The commo/crypto gear was hopefully destroyed be the sailors before they were boarded, but I doubt that too, and we will never get that back either.  The intel value in that stuff is simply too high for the Iranians to pass up.  And the Administration will not make any noise about that either.
8) The spineless US Administration will do absolutely nothing about this, other than get the sailors back, which President Obama will crow about ceaselessly (as if it were some great accomplishment), never mind the fact that the Iranians clearly engaged in an act of war (or by the most generous definition, international piracy) against the US.

These have been my assumptions since day one.  As previously mentioned, the facts have come to lend credence to each of my suspicions one by one, and I'll be shocked if this plays out any other way than I predict.  What are your thoughts?

* I keep saying boat(s) because I am still not 100% clear on if it was a single US boat or two or even three of them.  And frankly, my disgust with the news' attempt to paint this as an Iranian "rescue" mission from the moment this story broke has me unwilling to give them the traffic it would require for me to clarify that fact.  Their credulity strains belief, and were it not for the fact that I believe they took this line to curry favor with the White House, I'd say they were in Iran's pocket for taking this line.  So I'll blame their infatuation with the Administration's desire to cozy up to Iran's theocracy over their own cupidity in this case.

8 comments:

Grim said...

...the Iranian government pretends they have no control over...

Which government? The real trick with Iran is that it has two, functionally. The IRGC reports to the explicitly religious Revolutionary government, as opposed to the quasi-Western-structured elected government.

John F. Kerry says he called the Foreign Minister and made this 'quick release' happen. But the Foreign Minister really doesn't have control over the IRGC. The Supreme Commander, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he's the guy who makes the call.

douglas said...

What if Iran has figured out a way to jam/spoof GPS and got these guys to go off course while they thought they were in international waters? That would have huge implications beyond this incident. They may have done it with that drone a few years back, and this incident would give them the military encrypted GPS to work with, as they 'seized' it.

And the bigger question- Why wouldn't they do this? What repercussions would they expect relative the the obvious gains they would receive? None, under this administration.

Ymar Sakar said...

John F. Kerry says he called the Foreign Minister and made this 'quick release' happen.

When the gov acts "quickly", it's not due to an abundance of competence and planning, just as when they fail to act in Benghazi, it wasn't due to being stupid or incompetent. This seems rather close to the "intentional setup" type of thing.

Where people are quick, as I said before, because they knew what was going to happen ahead of time.

Both Benghazi and Bergdahl might have all been about finding justifications, using false flag ops, for giving away prisoners. The SOP is too similar over a period of time. The operations don't look exactly the same, since the Pentagon had authority over Bergdahl, but it is very close.

MikeD said...

Which government? The real trick with Iran is that it has two, functionally. The IRGC reports to the explicitly religious Revolutionary government, as opposed to the quasi-Western-structured elected government.

The answer is that the religious Revolutionary government is, in fact, in control of everything. The elected government is a farce put up to pay lip service to the idea that Iran is a Islamic Revolutionary Republic. It is not. There is not a single power held by the elected government that can override the will of the Ayatollahs, and there never will be (short of another revolution).

The Supreme Commander, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he's the guy who makes the call.

But this is true of everything in Iran. So, as I said, they pretend to not be able to control the IRGC, but... well you know.

What if Iran has figured out a way to jam/spoof GPS and got these guys to go off course while they thought they were in international waters? That would have huge implications beyond this incident. They may have done it with that drone a few years back, and this incident would give them the military encrypted GPS to work with, as they 'seized' it.

I've seen this theory and rejected it. Mostly because the GPS is not the only navigational tool on a Navy boat. They're required to keep multiple records of their progress, and use multiple navigational tools to do so. Many former Navy folks (including the brown water guys) all say they don't buy the "drifted into Iranian waters" bit, specifically because of this.

First off, if you want to accuse the crew of malfeasance and dereliction of duty, I might accept that, but I won't take it as a first order assumption. You'd need to prove that they'd been deficient on navigational charts prior to this incident for me to start to believe the dereliction explanation. If their inertial charts, plotted course, and GPS disagree in any way, a responsible crew would immediately report that fact and figure out which one was off, then ignore the bad data from it until the "malfunction" could be identified. The second reason I reject it is that the technical level required to spoof three geostationary satellites while completely masking their actual signal is beyond the Iranians. Hell, they can't even build believable fake aircraft. I take their aerospace technological ability as slightly more credible than North Korea's. These are not technical people. The Russians might could pull such a thing off. The Iranians? Not so much. Sure, they might confuse a drone which has extremely limited instrumentation and could be subject to strong ground based interference. A boat miles off shore? No way.

And the bigger question- Why wouldn't they do this? What repercussions would they expect relative the the obvious gains they would receive? None, under this administration.

Bingo. In fact, I pretty much suspect they did it because they could, because it would tweak Obama right before his last SOTU address, and because the IGRC doesn't need much excuse to commit general thuggery. They did it to the British and got away with it in 2008, why not the equally feckless Obama administration? After all, he crowed about "stopping Iran from getting a nuclear bomb", when his agreement with Iran did no such thing at all.

raven said...

This thing smells funny. Funny like bad crab bait.

We are asked, essentially, to believe our Navy is so utterly incompetent they had no idea how to navigate, how to secure a tow on a dead in the water vessel, or how to fight off a few bass boats.

I think the whole operation was deliberately planned by the upper ranks of traitors here and the Iranians, for some purpose unknown to us. Maybe the Iranians wanted to stick their thumb in our eye, and used the ever present "treaty" excuse once again as the worlds longest obama-lever.
Maybe obtaining the electronic equipment was the sole reason for the whole operation. Who knows what was on those boats or why.

Eric Blair said...

I think the Iranians did it to see what the administration's reaction would be. It basically didn't react, so the Iranians let the sailors go, and possibly more significantly, released those other prisoners. Which they had no real reason to do so. I mean, those prisoners were tried and convicted.

No reason to let them go. Iran was going to get its money. They're seeing what the agreement they made really means, I think.

The Saudis have got to be getting more and more nervous.



Grim said...

Which they had no real reason to do so. I mean, those prisoners were tried and convicted.

I understand that Iran got an additional $1.7B for doing so, plus the release of a number of its own spies... er, nationals who were unaccountably oppressed by our government for helping them violate the nuclear sanctions... I mean, engage in free and lawful trade.

MikeD said...

Yeah, never fear, those "prisoners" were bought and paid for with your tax dollars. No worries though, the Iranians will NEVER do it again, I'm sure...