The US News & World Report is reporting that Iranians had a showdown with US forces and as I said in the title, they are pushing their luck on a number of fronts.
As the British government demanded the immediate release of 15 of its sailors whose boats were seized by Iranian naval vessels in the Persian Gulf on Friday, U.S. News has learned that this is not the first showdown that coalition forces have had with the Iranian military.
According to a U.S. Army report out of Iraq obtained by U.S. News, American troops, acting as advisers for Iraqi border guards, were recently surrounded and attacked by a larger unit of Iranian soldiers, well within the border of Iraq.
I am going to stop right here for a second... is this NOT an act of war? Attacking American Troops?
ACT OF WAR - any act occurring in the course of declared war; armed conflict, whether or not war has been declared, between two or more nations; or armed conflict between military forces of any origin. 18 U.S.C.
Damn straight it is.
Lets not forget back in February when the news came out that the deadliest bombs used in Iraq were made by, who???? You got it!!! IRAN.
From my post back then a few excerpts from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates: (NYT)
WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — The most lethal weapon directed against American troops in Iraq is an explosive-packed cylinder that United States intelligence asserts is being supplied by Iran.
More from Gates:
Serial numbers and markings on explosives used in Iraq provide "pretty good" evidence that Iran is providing either weapons or technology for insurgents there, Defense Secretary Robert Gates asserted yesterday.
To those that continue to insist that we should "talk" to Iran, I will simply repeat what I asked you back in February:
How do you deal with someone that wants armageddon? How do you "negotiate" with Hitler? I have compared that lunatic thug that runs Iran to Hitler before and I am sure I will again.
Talking to them is out of the question because you do not deal with terrorists when you have nothing to offer them except your own death.
That question and statement still stands as I stand by it.
Back to todays report from US News & World Report:
The report highlights the details: A platoon of Iranian soldiers on the Iraqi side of the border fired rocket-propelled grenades and used small arms against a joint patrol of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers east of Balad Ruz. Four Iraqi Army soldiers, one interpreter, and one Iraqi border policeman remain unaccounted for after the September incident in eastern Diyala, 75 miles east of Baghdad.
During a joint border patrol, both American and Iraqi soldiers saw two Iranian soldiers run from Iraq back across the Iranian border as they approached. The patrol then came upon a single Iranian soldier, on the Iraqi side of the border, who did not flee.
While the joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol was speaking with the soldier, according to the report, the patrol was "approached by a platoon-size element of Iranian soldiers." An Iranian border captain then told the U.S. and Iraqi soldiers that "if they tried to leave their location, the Iranians would fire upon them." During this conversation with the Iranian captain, Iranian forces began firing and continued when U.S. troops tried to withdraw.
The fact that acts such as these have been allowed to occur with NO RETALIATION is unacceptable.
American forces may soon be getting further insight into recent Iranian attacks. Earlier this month, a former Iranian deputy defense minister who once commanded the Revolutionary Guards–and is thought to have considerable knowledge of Iran's national security network–left the country and is said to be cooperating with western intelligence agencies, sharing information on links between Iran and Hezbollah in south Lebanon, for example. Iranian officials said the official, Ali Rez Asgari, was kidnapped by western agents.
Shortly afterward, Iran threatened to retaliate in Europe for the supposed kidnapping, what it claims to be the most recent in a series of abductions in the past three months. According to the British Sunday Times, in the Revolutionary Guards' weekly newspaper this week, a columnist believed to have close ties to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote: "We've got the ability to capture a nice bunch of blue-eyed, blond-haired officers and feed them to our fighting cocks. Iran has enough people who can reach the heart of Europe and kidnap Americans and Israelis."
Now, they have kidnapped 15 British soldiers, in yet another Act of War.
Britain’s crisis with Iran deepened last night after Tehran justified seizing 15 British servicemen by claiming that they had strayed into Iranian territorial waters “illegally”.
The announcement appeared to rule out any hope that the incident was a simple mistake that could be quickly rectified.
Instead, there were growing fears that the 15 British sailors and Royal Marines were victims of a deliberate ambush on the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway by Iranian Revolutionary Guards, perhaps seeking to use the captives as hostages in the increasingly tense stand-off between the West and Iran over its nuclear programme.
I have said it once and I will say it again and again until people start "getting it".
Ahmadinejad is a lunatic.
Is it any wonder the idiot has cancelled his UN appearance?
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has canceled his trip to New York to address the U.N. Security Council before a vote on whether to impose further sanctions against his country for refusing to stop enriching uranium, the Foreign Ministry spokesman said Friday.
Mohammed Ali Hosseini, the spokesman, told Iranian state television that the trip was scrapped because of "America's obstruction in issuing visas" to the Iranian delegation that was to travel to New York.
I doubt every word of this but would be very, VERY happy if America HAD obstructed his ability to get a visa.... that would be the smartest thing we could do.
Did we? I doubt it. Personally I believe that Ahmadinejad is a coward and after this latest act of war, the one functioning brain cell left in his head kicked in and he decided he would be wise not to come into this country.
Why on earth would we issue him any visas at any time is beyond me.
I have done multiple posts on Iran and Iranian related issues as has many others and yet no one does anything about him.
We left another lunatic alone once and he created the conditions for World War II...some may know his name: ADOLPH HITLER.
People need to wake up and understand the threat Ahmadinejad poses and for god sake, do something about him.
The UN and the Security Council is incapable and incompetent to be able to handle this problem, so it will be left up to the individual countries to act now before this lunatic becomes a lunatic WITH nuclear capabilities.
Never Forget.
.
Or maybe, just maybe, Iran is actually doing what any country would do... defend its territory.
ReplyDeleteThings are never as simple as we'd like to believe... Makes for rough going from the "black or white", "with us or again' us" crowd. So much easier to yell "Kidnapping" and run around like a headless chicken. Makes it easier to justify a bit of bombing, too.
From the Guardian :
Because the two countries have not agreed on updated charts, that means there is no universal agreement on exactly where the border line runs.
If the seizure occurred near the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab - which is likely - the issue becomes even more complicated because Iraq and Iran have never agreed on each others' claim to Gulf waters near the mouth of the waterway.
Without such an agreement, international law requires countries not to extend their territorial waters ``beyond the median line with neighboring states,'' said Martin Pratt of the University of Durham in Britain.
But defining that line is difficult because of conflicting claims to rock formations, sandbars and barrier islands in the shallow waters of the northern Gulf, Pratt said.
As a result, there may be ``legitimate grounds for arguing for a different definition'' of those median lines, Pratt said.