Warren County Report

Alleged radio transmitted threats by Iran against US Naval forces in the Gulf Of Hormuz on Jan. 6, 2008, resulted in a harsh warning of dire consequences against Iran by US President George W. Bush.

With war rhetoric escalating out of the White House in the wake of an apparent “war of words” being hurled at U.S. ships stationed in the Middle East just days before his appearance at the Middletown campus of Lord Fairfax Community College on Jan. 11, we asked Senator Jim Webb about the danger of an expanded war front in the Middle East.

“The situation as I read it in the Persian Gulf the other day was not the kind of incident that you would rationally use as a justification for escalating force. In fact, there was something in the paper this morning that said the … threatening language that they had intercepted really wasn’t even Iranian. So, we need to calm down, we need to get this administration to accept yes for an answer in terms of trying to develop a dialogue with Iran and we need to couple that with dramatically decreasing our military presence in Iraq and the region will become more stable.”

War with a monkey?

On Jan. 14, London Times writers Michael Evans and Michael Theodoulou quoted a US Navy Times article citing the possibility Jan. 6 radio threats cited by President Bush in warning Iran of potential US military retaliation was actually a well-known character in the region tagged the Filipino monkey.

“The revelation that a hostile prankster has been breaking into radio traffic for years and heckling ship commanders has emerged in the Navy Times. Could it be the so-called Filipino Monkey who nearly provoked a shooting match on January 6?” the British writers asked of the Jan. 6 incident. Citing the Navy Times article, the London Times quoted retired US Navy Capt. Rick Hoffman stating, “For 25 years there has been this mythical guy out there who, hour after hour, shouts obscenities and threats … The Filipino Monkey aimed much of his most obscene tirades at women in the US Navy whenever they went on the radio,” Hoffman told the Navy Times.

The Filipino monkey tag was apparently a result of American ears interpretation of the culprit’s accent and endless radio chatter.

Hoffman, who commanded the cruiser USS Hue City and spent many of his 17 years at sea in the Gulf [of Hormuz], noted that under certain weather conditions radio transmissions can travel great distances and their sources are virtually impossible to pinpoint.

History lesson

Webb, a former Secretary of the Navy and Vietnam War veteran, said history offers lessons the White House seems content to continue ignoring.

“I think the way to deal with Iran is the way that we dealt with China in the early ‘70s. China in the early ‘70s was a nuclear power already, it had an American war on its border in Vietnam; it was spouting all this rhetoric about the United States similar to what Iran is saying. And we took nothing off the table in terms of our military posture in the region but we reached out aggressively [and] developed a diplomatic relationship with China that has had its ups and downs, but actually the best benefit was that it brought them into the international community.”

And the Chinese example is but one historical indicator that being accepted into the international community, rather than isolated from it lessens the type of regional desperation that can trigger wars.

“And there have been many signals from Iran going all the way back to 2001 that indicate that Iran has had an interest in developing some sort of diplomatic relations. And this administration has had as a policy that it will not do that. And it’s harmful to what we’re trying to do, even in Iraq,” Webb said on Jan. 11.

The right set of ‘facts’

“The difficulty is that this Administration … views the ’02 authorization to go to war against Iraq to be broad enough that it could use it [to expand the war], particularly if gets a provocative act from Iran … I introduced legislation last March saying there will be no unilateral action against Iran other than to immediately repel an attack or those sorts of things, without the express approval of the Congress. The problem is that if the Administration had the right set of alleged ‘facts’ it could justify action against Iran without going to Congress – and we’ve been trying in a lot of different ways to keep that from happening.”

Circular logic?

And history’s verdict on the Gulf of Tonkin incident?

According to the Naval Historical Center website, “More recent analysis of that data and additional information gathered on the 4 August episode now makes it clear that North Vietnamese naval forces did not attack Maddox and Turner Joy that night in the summer of 1964.”

The official US Navy website also reports that during an actual engagement two days earlier as the USS Maddox supported South Vietnamese gunboat and commando raids against North Vietnam, the Maddox was virtually untouched while the North Vietnamese suffered heavy damage from the Maddox and US air support.

“Of greater significance, on 7 August the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly passed the so-called Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which enabled Johnson to employ military force as he saw fit against the Vietnamese Communists. In the first months of 1965, the President ordered the deployment to South Vietnam of major U.S. ground, air, and naval forces. Thus began a new phase in America’s long, costly Vietnam War,” the Naval Historical website summarized.

Ten years, the bulk of 60,000 American and 2-million Vietnamese lives later, America retreated from Southeast Asia, its “political” mission abandoned in the midst of a civil war and regional holocaust unleashed for the most part over the span of its military presence there.