Hyping Hormuz

HYPING HORMUZ....Last weekend's incident in the Strait of Hormuz, it turns out, was actually pretty routine, according to Gareth Porter:

A Pentagon consultant who asked not to be identified told IPS that he had spoken with officers who had experienced similar encounters with small Iranian boats throughout the 1990s, and that such incidents are "just not a major threat to the U.S. Navy by any stretch of the imagination".

Just two weeks earlier, on Dec. 19, the USS Whidbey Island, an amphibious warship, had fired warning shots after a small Iranian boat allegedly approached it at high speed. But that incident had gone without public notice.

So what happened? How and why did this morph into a grave threat to national security? Porter's take is here.