NPR’s “On the Media” had an interesting interview with Bill Arkin this morning about the conflicting videotapes released by the U.S. and Iran that showed different perspectives on the interaction between three U.S. Navy ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz and a set of five speedboats from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that “buzzed” the Americans early on the morning of January 6 (Gulf time). To review, the U.S. issued a press release followed by some commentary at an off-the-record briefing early on the morning of Jan. 7 (Washington time, 10 hours behind the Strait of Hormuz, meaning that some 31 hours had passed to consider what to say in Washington) explaining that Iranian speedboats had menaced the American warships by charging, pushing boxes with unknown contents overboard near the path of the American ships, and making the threatening statement that the American ships would soon “explode” over an open radio channel (see initial coverage, for example, here). The incident set the backdrop for some of President Bush’s comments about Iran — specifically, how dangerous Iran might be — during his trip to the Middle East, which immediately followed the indicent. When the tapes turned out to have been modified, and when people began to learn that Iranian boats had interacted with American warships before, talk of a conspiracy — or at least biased spinning for political ends — swept the policy world and blogosphere (see, for example, often astute and interesting analysts like Gareth Porter, here and here, and Justin Raimundo, here). Arkin’s NPR interview baldly stated that the Pentagon created the dust-up to prepare the ground for President Bush’s trip, to make it easier for him to build an anti-Iranian coalition among the Gulf States.

Arkin is an expert on technical aspects of military affairs who currently writes an online column for the Washington Post, but he has also been a well-known guy in the security studies community for a long time. What he has to say has a certain credibility, and his explanation of the controversy over “doctoring” of the videos was very clear: both the Americans and the Iranians released video of a real incident, and the audio that accompanied both tapes was real and from the morning of Jan. 6, too, but neither the American tape’s audio nor the Iranian tape’s audio matched the video — that is, on each tape, two events were mashed together for political effect. It is unlikely that the threatening audio on the American tape was a broadcast from the Iranian speedboats (it probably came from a prankster), but the peaceful radio interchange on the Iranian tape actually came from a separate interaction between the Iranian Navy and the American warships that had taken place two hours before the speedboat incident. Note that the Iranian Navy is a different organization, with different commanders and different interests, from the highly ideological and zealous Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which commanded the speedboats.

So what should we make of the incident? I was actually on a trip to the Gulf from January 4-11 precisely to do research about how to assess the potential that military conflict in the Strait of Hormuz might disrupt oil tanker traffic — a nightmare scenario often discussed in the press (including in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 incident, for example, here). Of course, I don’t have a complete picture: I didn’t see the incident, and I only met with relatively few people, but at least they were informed people interested in exactly the kind of questions bandied about in the discussion of the incident.

In my conversations, it was clear that many people in the region thought that the point of President Bush’s trip was to rally support for an attack on Iran, and Bush’s rhetoric during the trip certainly played into that narrative. I’m sure the trip really had a lot of motives and a lot of agenda items — democratization, the Arab-Israeli peace process, trade initiatives, jawboning about the price of oil — but the discussion of the incident and the president’s repeated comments about Iran in almost every public appearance certainly drowned out the rest. That doesn’t seem like a good outcome for the general policy discussion about the region, which tends to be too shrill and too conspiracy-laden in the best of times.

My interactions with the Navy at Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain (I had several meetings there on January 7 in the hours just before the story broke in Washington) might remind us all about the difficulties of understanding intentions and risks in military affairs. It’s true that the Jan. 7 discussion was the first time that the U.S. had made a big public deal of its back-and-forth with Iranian, especially Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, speedboats, and the timing is, indeed, suspicious. Maybe, once again, this was a case of politicians manipulating military affairs and intelligence for their own ends. But the military actually has a real problem, and my sense from my meetings on Jan. 7 — meetings that were regularly interrupted as someone came into the room to confer in whispers about the meaning of the incident and what to say to the public about it — was that that naval officers really were concerned about what to make of the Iranians’ behavior.

And that shouldn’t come as a surprise: in the security studies community, we have been studying the threat to large ships from swarms of small boats for some time. Small boats, whether using suicide tactics or stand-off weapons ranging from small arms and RPGs to anti-ship missiles, pose unique dangers, because it is hard to determine their intentions until it is too late, because a large number of small, fast-moving attackers can overwhelm a ship’s fire control and combat-management systems, and for other operational reasons. Small boats are not perfect as asymmetric weapons, but we should be paying attention to them. (For my study of potential economic disruption, notably, small boats have limited capacity against large commercial ships; the swarming tactics are designed to overcome challenges posed by warships not by oil tankers.)

The press has made much in recent days of the fact that Iranian boats have buzzed many ships in the past — American and coalition warships and commercial traffic, too. That behavior has established a baseline pattern, normal “rules of the game.” Each time the Iranians act a little bit differently, Americans have to judge whether the Iranian action is just a minor variation on a theme or whether it is a substantial escalation; if they (or we) break the rules or try to change them, then that’s a dangerous moment. And the Americans have to make that judgment both at the tactical level (the guys on the bridge and in the combat information center of the ship in the water facing the Iranian speedboats) and also at the strategic level (even if they bent the rules, does it matter? Should we try to bend the rules back?).

When the military and diplomats get the idea that they are sending complex signals back and forth to an adversary or potential adversary through this sort of kabucki theater, we should all worry a bit, because there is tremendous potential for misunderstanding and miscalculation. Military interactions are really a very blunt instrument, and no one should lose sight of that fact. But even if we can get past the attempts to read nuance into the situation, we should remember that the baseline is that events like this are dangerous, and it’s perfectly reasonable to report on them. And I don’t need to think that there’s some sort of military or political conspiracy to foment conflict with Iran to be concerned. Even if the audio signal on Jan. 6 was from a prankster, the Iranian speedboats behaved oddly, and the boxes they were dumping overboard might have been dangerous. The video by itself is enough to make me worry.
I hope that we won’t respond to incidents like this with escalating violence, because I don’t think there’s much to gain. And I hope the Iranians aren’t themselves seriously considering a military escalation as they push the envelope to assert more influence on how the U.S. Navy acts so close to their homeland. We should remember the big picture: we’re sending warships into their neighborhood, and they have a right to be suspicious of us, just as we have a right to be suspicious of them. Let’s keep cool heads in charge on our side and hope that they will do so, too.

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