Japan and Iran

This is, I think, the first time that I’ve made three posts to my blog in one day. I just keep reading things that I want to remark on so I type them up here where I can delude myself that someone will read them.

So, after wading through the Election ‘08 news and the President-is-going-to-the-Middle-(Muddle?)-East-to-pretend-he’s-done-something-there news, you might have gotten to the news about the confrontation between three U.S. Navy warships and five Iranian speedboats. It seems our ships were trolling along in what most of the world thinks is international waters when several speedboats came zooming up and radioed that they were going to explode our ships or something. We got it on tape even. We believe that since the boats came from the direction of Iran, they were Iranian.

Iran says the tape is a fabrication and denies the entire incident. No surprise there. Personally, I don’t see how they think this sort of brinksmanship behavior benefits them. Really what does it get them? Shake your fist at the big kid in the playground and then run away claiming it never happened?

Anyway, I got to thinking for some reason of December 7, 1941, a different armed attack on the U.S. Navy (and others). There are plenty of things surrounding the Pearl Harbor attack to criticize the Japanese about if you have a mind to do so. However, at least the nation that perpetrated that action had the balls not to deny having done it. Had the current Iranian government been in power in Tokyo in 1941, after Pearl Harbor got bombed, they would have denied it happened, denied that the U.S. ever had those ships, claimed the pictures were fabrications, and probably argued that Pearl Harbor had strayed into their territorial waters.

Somehow, I don’t think I’d believe them then either.