Rebutting Hooman Majd

The Huffington Post has given space to a man named Hooman Majd. Majd is an Iranian-born writer and music exec who is reflexively anti-American apparently.

Here's what he wrote:

The Pentagon's version of the encounter in the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday morning, involving U.S. Navy warships and Iranian Revolutionary Guard patrol boats is, at the very least highly suspicious. On Tuesday, the Navy released video footage and an audiotape to back its claims that the Iranian boats acted in a threatening and provocative manner, but neither the video nor the audio are particularly convincing as proof that Iran had hostile intentions.

The video is not conclusive evidence because of the angle in which it was taken, I'll give Majd that but what he fails to understand is that the ship was at general quarters passing through the strait because this is a familiar tactic of the Iranian's. During GQ, every single sailor aboard has a station to man and none of those stations is designated official videographer. Mr. Majd produced singer Tricky and the video and audio made of him were highly produced and I still don't find them "particularly convincing as proof" that the dude can sing. But I digress.

Let's continue with the worlds longest run-on paragraph:

The video, which shows what is claimed are Iranian boats speeding around U.S. ships, doesn't show any of the boats hurtling directly towards any of the navy ships, nor does it show what the Pentagon claimed the Iranians then did, namely dropped "white boxes" in the water. (I would have opened fire at those, wouldn't you?)

So now not only is Majd a writer and producer, he's a captain of a US Naval ship. It amazes me that people like this blowhard think military men are the stupidest people in creation when the C.O. of a US Naval warship has more education than the entire board at Island Records where Mr. Majd worked his magic.

Anyway, note the use of "claimed" throughout as if they were lying.

The audio tape is even less convincing, mainly because the person speaking doesn't have an Iranian accent and moreover, sounds more like Boris Karloff in a horror movie than a sailor in the elite branch of Iran's military. (The tape is also separate from any video.) Any Iranian can immediately identify Persian-accented English, particularly if the speaker has had little contact with the West, as is the case with Revolutionary Guardsmen and sailors. Iranians, you see, have difficulty with two consonants such as "p" and "l" next to each other; even Iranians who have lived in America for years will often pronounce "please" as "peh-leeze", or in this case, "explode" as "exp-eh-lode". On the tape, "explode" is pronounced perfectly, albeit as if the speaker was a villain addressing a superhero. Further, it is unimaginable, given what is known about the Revolutionary Guards (and I have met many), that one of its corps would speak in a such a manner, even if the accent were correctly Persian.

Again, the tape is of poor quality and how exactly would Majd know that the sailors and Revolutionary Guardsmen have had no contact with the West? It seems they had no problem communicating with the Brits when they hijacked their boat now did they?

The fact that the Iranian foreign ministry downplayed the encounter as routine and minor, and that the Revolutionary Guards, not known for their moderation, actually denied the U.S. version of events, is curious. Iran, which is usually keen to exploit its image as a fearless foe of the U.S., would ordinarily relish the opportunity to show that it can be a menace to the great superpower, particularly if, as the encounter shows, the U.S. does little to counter that menace.

Just like Syria likes to trumpet and scream every time they are invaded by Israel? How come Assad didn't relish this encounter with his arch enemies?

Let me tell you all a story about my experience with the Iranian military. In 1992, my ship was traversing the Straits of Hormuz on the way to Oman. Iranian gunboats encircled the ship and got dangerously close--this was pre-USS Cole days mind you. I was stationed on a starboard-side .50 cal gun mount and was tracking the boats awaiting the word to open fire. It's not hard to hit a small boat with a rapid fire weapon, you just walk it in. But alas, we didn't wish to cause an international incident and were told to safe the weapons. I was ready to take them out as soon as ordered to do so and I wished they had done so as a warning to steer clear of US warships in international waters.

Flash forward to present, the Straits are a thin strip of water and the Iranian's are always in the area when we travel through them. They have made hostile gestures to us for years and--keeping in mind the USS Cole attack--the captain was indeed cautious, if not entirely foolish to not at least fire a warning shot but he was there and I was not.

Iranian patrol boats do indeed, as Iran freely admits, check on ships that enter the Persian Gulf, in this case only three miles outside its territorial waters, much as one would expect them to do (and as the U.S. Coast Guard would undoubtedly do if a foreign fleet of warships cruised within fifteen miles of say, Miami Beach), but apart from the arrest of the British sailors last year, there is hardly ever even a sharp exchange of words. At the risk of sounding like (and as I'm sure I will be accused of being) an apologist for the Islamic Republic, the encounter with the U.S. Navy as described by the Pentagon just doesn't ring true. Coming as it did on the eve of President Bush's visit to the Middle East, the encounter as described is doubly suspicious.

Ding ding! We have a winner. You don't sound like an apologist for the Islamic Republic, you sir are an apologist for that vile regime (you know, the country that "has no gay people"). He freely admits that Iran has a right to harass US shipping in international waters. To most people, that's an act of aggression. To Mr. Majd, it's Iran's right to do so in the a strait that is devilishly thin.

I'm sorry if I don't acknowledge the expertise of a record producer over that of a US Navy Commander so at the risk of sounding like an apologist for the Navy and being that he sounds exactly like an apologist, Mr. Majd's hypothesis sounds doubly suspicious. The fact that Iran--your birth country and the nation you now defend--was complicit in taking 52 Americans hostage and holding them for 444-day, was responsible for the death of hundreds of Marines in Beirut and now arms both Syria and Hezbollah makes me triply suspicious, sir.

Read the man's entire post. He's anti-Bush, is a shill for Iran and has the feeling that most elites have when discussing military matters, the air that he is smarter than them because they are in the military in the first place, which means they were too dumb to do anything else.

Update: Bryan at Hot Air has video and thanks for linking again.

Update: (1112 1/10/08): Bryan has video from the Iranian side. It confirms even less.