NIAC’s excellent blog reported yestetrday that U.S. representatives Conyers and Davis have introduced a sense of the House bill calling for the negotiation of an incidents at sea agreement with Iran. The full text of the resolution is here, but the jist is that the absence of military protocols for navigating Hormuz makes incidents like the 2008 Iranian harassment of a U.S. warship much more likely, and that without agreements in place or communication channels to resolve disputes, such an incident could easily escalate into a wider conflict. A key clause of the resolution frames the naval protocol as a step that can be taken even without a U.S.-Iran diplomatic reconciliation:
Whereas the absence of diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran need not be an obstacle to direct, military to military talks on procedural issues involving the safety of naval personnel and assets;
This comes on the heels of comments by General Petraeus that seemed to downplay concerns over Iranian aggressiveness in the Gulf and echoed concerns about unintended conflicts. An excerpt from the Bloomberg story:
“I don’t think we have any concerns about disruption to the navigation” in the Gulf, Army General David Petraeus said in an interview. “Certainly nothing from Iran.”
Iran’s naval forces have been quiet in the 15 months since U.S. officials say they challenged three U.S. Navy warships briefly in international waters in the Strait of Hormuz. Five Iranian “fast boats” in January 2008 confronted the vessels in the 33-mile-wide waterway between Iran and Oman at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, which is the sea route for almost a quarter of the world’s daily supply of oil.
Tensions at that time “were approaching the point where a miscalculation could result in something fairly serious, and I think everyone took a deep breath and stepped back from the ledge,” Petraeus said.
“We are still not sure whether that was sort of a rogue, small-boat operator getting a little bit feisty or what that was,’ ‘ he said, referring to the 2008 incident. “That has indeed calmed down. We’ve done a large number of transits with big-decked ships and they haven’t been impeded in any way.”
Before his departure at the tail end of the Bush Adminstration, Admiral Fallon had been one of the loudest voices calling for a naval agreement that could help reduce tensions in one of the world’s key strategic points. The resolution introduced yesterday cites support from DOD officials, that, taken with Petraeus’ comments, seem to point to an emerging consensus in the U.S. military on such a common sense step.
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