Subscribe to Topics
Ken Timmerman is an intrepid courageous journalist and writer. Whether tracking the “Shadow Warriors” - the miscreants at both State and the CIA who have tried to do in our policies in the ‘long war’ in the Middle east and Iran’s nuclear weapons development - or raising the specter of a looming confrontation between Iran and the US in the Persian Gulf waters, he is prescient, ahead of emerging developments. There’s a reason for that. Ken has suffered at the hands of the Jihadis that he speaks of frequently. As a working journalist in Beirut during the first Lebanon war in 1982, he was captured and held hostage by PLO-Fatah operatives for three weeks. That has made an indelible impression on him of what Jihad and Political Islam is all about. It threads through much of his advocacy work on behalf of regime change in Iran and in his unstinting support for the security of Israel. There is an engrossing profile of Timmerman in this article from the Montgomery (County) Gazette- a Washington suburban newspaper. Read it.
Timmerman’s NewsMax.com article delves into two subjects-the provocative acts of the IRGC speedboats attacking US Naval vessels in the Persian Gulf and the looming red line for an Israeli unilateral attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Timmerman suggests that what occurred in the Straits of Hormuz earlier this week is part of deliberate strategy to test the responses of local US naval vessel commanders to react and determine the soft points in our rules of engagement.
Witness this comment by a veteran of the 1980’s tanker war in the Persian Gulf : .
“The incident on January 6 was unusual in that it involved the taunting of U.S. Navy warships engaged in free passage through the Strait of Hormuz,” said retired Navy Cmdr. Joseph Tenaglia, a maritime security specialist who was deployed in the region on active duty during the tanker war in the 1980s and has been studying the region for 26 years.
“I think this is a game of chicken. You have some young hothead radicals with a speedboat and some weapons who are told go out and bother the Americans, but don’t get too close or they may shoot. After all it’s called the Persian Gulf not the American Gulf.”
This could be a prelude to a repeat of the tanker wars of the 1980’s, that the US won and enabled the flow of oil from the Gulf to continue unabated during the Iran Iraq war. Timmerman ties the current incident in with others that occurred last spring.
Of more concern is the question of what Israel will do when the Russians deliver fuel to the Busheir nuclear reactor in Iran. A former Naval officer, now an analyst at the Heritage foundation, Peter Brookes suggests, as we have posted, that Israel will have to launch a pre-emptive attack akin to that of the famed Osirak reactor ‘raid on the sun’ near Baghdad in June, 1981 when the IAF took out the late Saddam Hussein’s nuclear facility. The reason for it as Brooke explains in this Timmerman article is:
In both cases, Israel struck before any nuclear material was present, “to prevent radiation from the reactor being spewed into the atmosphere after a strike,” Brookes said last week.
A similar motive could now prompt Israel to strike Iran in the coming weeks or months, before the Russian nuclear material is delivered to Busheir, Brookes believes.
by Kenneth Timmerman, NewsMax.com, January 10, 2008
The near-miss confrontation between Iranian speedboats and a U.S. naval convoy in the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday was a clear provocation by Iran, aimed at testing the reaction time of U.S. Navy commanders and the political will of the United States, sources within the Iranian military tell Newsmax.
The U.S. failed the test, because no shots were fired, the Iranians said. (more…)
