Waiting for Nasrullah on Ashoura

I’m sitting here at 10:50 a.m. in Beirut watching Hizbullah’s t.v.
station, al-Manar, as it airs the big processions taking place in the
southern suburbs to mark Ashoura,
the anniversary of the killing of Hussein Ibn Ali in the Battle of
Kerbala (in present Iraq) in A.D. 680.  The broad streets are
completely crammed with black-clad figures, men and women, some waving
high yellow, black, or red flags.  Some wear the broad yellow
scarves of Hizbullah, some wear green scarves.  Broad chants rise
from sections of the crowd, among them: “I follow you, Hussein!… I
follow you Hizbullah!”  A few minutes ago, some organized cohorts
of men  were rhythmically striking themselves.

10:55.  Now the crowds seem to have come to a large open
space.  The camera zooms in to a portion of it where there some
commotion and with a grainy long-distance lens we see Sayeed Hassan
Nasraullah in the middle of the crowd with his bodyguards trying to
clear a space in front of him…  I imagine the Israelis are
watching this too.  Suddenly the loudspeaker shouts “I foolow you
Nasrullah!” The crowd repeats it ecstatically.  The speaker then
plays his voice, recorded, greeting people and shouting the slogan of
Ashoura: “Haihat min al-zilla” (translated by Amal Saad-Ghorayeb as
“Humiliation is unthinkable.”)

Death to America. Death to Israel.

The crowd, claimed to number a million, is being guided from nearby
streets into the square.

Last night I watched a Manar
broadcast of Nasrullah giving a fairly lengthy oration in a vast
enclosed space.  It was a lengthy religious/political allegory
talking about why Hussein entered the battle of Kerbala even though he
knew death was a possibility.  But his burning desire for justice
pushed him on. Nasrullah recounted the story in an expert mixture of
sonorous classical Arabic fus-ha and whenever he was representing what
people (including Hussein) actually said, he would render this in
Lebanese demotic and his whole body language would change to more that
of a traditional, fatherly storyteller. (You can actually see a good example of this rhetorical style of his– with English subtitles– on this months-old YouTube clip.)

The “lesson” he gave in last night’s speech was that Hussein was not seeking martyrdom and nor
was he seeking to
grab control of the regime; but he was simply taking determined action
based on his strong desire for justice, and the outcome was in God’s
hand.  (A fairly Buddhistic lesson, if I might say; certainly one
with broad human relevance.)  In talking with Amal S-G this
morning she said the main lesson there seemed to be against those who
urge pursuit of martyrdom operations for their own sake.  Or, as
she said, an anti-salafi message.

In the crowd now, families, women in cohorts. Women with and
without headscarves, but most with.  Men carrying small children.

Now the crowd has parted to provide an eight-foot clear walkway, with
stewards holding the crowd back on each side.  Now coming down
this walkway a small group of people, including many men in green
scarves…

11:15.  Well, I guess the Israelis may have been watching and even
targeting the cleared walkway but now, suddenly, there he is still in
the middle of the crowd, smiling and waving.  Unclear from the
images exactly where in the crowd he is.

Loud shouted chants with call and response.  Sung chants in which
from time to time the crowd joins.  Mixing “I follow you,
Hussein!” with “I follow you, Nasrullah!”

Notes about this.  An apparently
new level of personalization here: more Nasrullah than Hizbullah. 
An assertiveness about being Shiite.  Understandable, of course,
since this is a religious holiday for the Shiites.  But the whole
holiday from its origins to this manifestation of it has an
unmistakeable anti-Sunni cast to it?

11:20  Oh, here from one side-street comes a procession pulling
along a disabled Israeli tank.

Big shouts for Hussein.  Then Death to America; death to Israel.

Different crowds– some organized into cohorts, some just ambling
along– are still coming along different side-streets.

The camera shows us a large group of turbanned imams.

When I talked with Amal Saad-Ghorayeb
an hour ago, she noted that the Hizb has invested a lot in today’s
event/spectacle including from the media point of view.  Ive just
been thinking about the camera work involved in all this.  They
have large numbers of cameras mounted on, presumably, high buildings
around the area.  Sometimes we have four different split-screen
views but there are certainly more cameras than that.  Hizbullah
has always, as I’ve noted before, been good at circuses as well as
bread (and military shrewdness.)

11:30. Preparations still underway, including centrally the
getting-into-position of people who are still gathering from along the
side-streets. The voice on the speaker seems to be getting into a more
somber mood.

11:35.  His arrival is announced.  But we still don’t see
him.  Someone else is doing a chanted song.

Nir Rosen on the Nahr al-Bared events, etc

Just ten days or so ago I was sitting with Nir in the lobby of the Gefinor Rotana Hotel in Beirut– and here is the piece he was crashing on finishing at that point.
It is a great and detailed piece of reporting on the whole phenomenon of the emergence, after the Syrians’ 2005 withdrawal from Lebanon, of Sunni salafist extremist groups in some Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and some other parts of Lebanon, too. That phenomenon came to a crescendo with last summer’s fighting in the Nahr al-Bared camp in the north of the country.
Nir has some fascinating new details about the involvement of Hariri-owned banks in helping the salafists– who held a number of different nationalities– bring into the country the huge amounts of dosh they apparently had at their disposal while they were here.
This is an important piece of reporting. Nir should perhaps have spelled out that Bernard Rougier, whom he quotes, is probably the world’s greatest expert on the question of militant Islamism in Lebanon’s long horrendously oppressed and besieged refugee camps. Here is a link to the recent English version of Rougier’s book on the topic, Everyday Jihad.
I would add a couple more comments here:

    1. The rise of extremist groups within Lebanon after the Syrians’ departure has many intriguing analogies to what happened here after Ariel Sharon’s shock troops succeeded in chasing the PLO forces out of West Beirut in summer 1982. It was after that point that the whole of the (non-Syrian-controlled) part of the country became a safe haven for all kinds of new extremist groups.
    Between 1976 and 1982, western embassies in Beirut had solid agreements with the PLO’s security forces to provide protection for their diplomats and nationals. In 1978, when my then-employers at the Sunday Times felt that my life was under threat because of the recent killing of my colleague David Holden, they contacted the British Embassy (since I was a British national), who arranged with Abu Ja’afar in the PLO’s security force to provide me with a 24-hour bodyguard. Actually, the ST wanted me to leave Beirut, but I couldn’t because I was 8.7 months pregnant. So the bodyguards came with me to the maternity hospital. Joy, rapture. (Irony alert.) That was 30 years ago this February. That was just one tiny example of what all the western embassies were doing in those days. (I should write here about my former neighbor Abu Hassan Salameh some time; his role in negotiating those agreements, his relations with the CIA, and the CIA’s unwillingness to shield him from the Israeli assassination operation that ended his life. There’s gratitude for you…)
    After the PLO’s departure in 1982, there was no body able to provide security to western diplomats and nationals. That’s when Malcolm Kerr got killed; when numerous westerners were taken hostage; and when western embassies started getting blown up.
    I won’t say Lebanon is quite in that state of anarchy yet. But the analogy of booting a stabilization force out of this country and then finding there’s no-one capable of providing day-to-day security is an unsettling one.
    2. The Palestinian refugees trapped in their dismal hovels in Lebanon got the short end of the stick in the whole “Fateh al-Islam” story as recounted by Nir…. just as they’ve gotten the short end of the stick– from the Israelis, from many Lebanese, from others– throughout much of their whole tragic history here in Lebanon. I’d like to note, since I’ve just returned to Lebanon from Syria, that the situation of the Palestinian refugees in Syria is exponentially better than that of the Palestinian refugees here. There, they have the same social and economic rights as any Syrian citizen, and many have risen to the top of their professions. Here, there is still a list of 74 professions from which Palestinians are proscribed; they can’t own real estate; they can’t even expand their own cramped shelters without getting approval from the authorities (rarely given); and many of them have direly curtailed freedom of movement.
    There was something in the Daily Star recently about some 5,000 “unregistered” Palestinians here now being offered registration. I’m note sure how much good that will do them.
    If the Palestinian “state” being discussed by Abu Mazen and Co is to have any value or meaning at all, it should surely be a state that can (a) provide safe haven for beleaguered Palestinians here and everywhere else, and (b) intercede with other governments on an equal basis to ensure that the rights of its nationals are not abused.
    Statelessness– that is, being in the situation of being not just a refugee but a refugee without any recognized nationality or citizenship– is a very vulnerable situation to be in. Ask the Palestinians in Lebanon…

But first of all, go read Nir’s informative, if depressing, story.

Text of interview with Bushra Kanafani

Interview with Ms. Bushra Kanafani, Director of the Foreign Media
Department at the Syrian Minister of Foreign Affairs

Conducted for Just World News by Helena
Cobban, Jan. 15, 2008.

Q:  I’d like to
ask your views about the recent Annapolis conference.  What
persuaded Syria to take part, and how do you view the outcome?

A:  The question
of Golan is a national priority for us as Syrians– the people and the
government.  It is wrong for any international conference on the
Arab-Israeli issue to ignore Golan.  Golan needs to be on the
agenda.  That was why we went.  We agreed that the
Palestinian question could have priority.  But at least Golan
should be on the agenda, even if it is not given equal prominence.

Right now, we are not sure about the status of the Syrian-Israeli track
in the negotiations.  We still see no sign of willingness from
Israel or the United States– at this point– to resume the Syrian
track of negotiations.

Q:  How about the
position of the other members of the ‘Quartet’?

A: The Russians have
talked about holding a follow-on international conference in Moscow,
but they have announced no decision yet– perhaps because there are
still so many difficulties.

The US administration is stressing the Palestinian track for their own internal reasons.

If there is a Moscow conference, its content is still unknown.  So
far we have no reason to think there will be such a conference. 
If there is one, we would go– for the same reason we went to
Annapolis: to make sure that the Golan question is on the agenda.

Q:  Do you have
any reason for new hope regarding achievements on the Palestinian track
since Annapolis?

A: Unfortunately
not.  There is nothing to indicate that there is any hope…

Continue reading “Text of interview with Bushra Kanafani”

Safieh to step down

Afif Safieh, who has been an articulate and effective representative for the PLO/PA in Washington for the past 18 months, announced yesterday that he has asked Abu Mazen to relieve him of his duties.
In the announcement, Safieh says this is for health reasons. But even a quick reading of the announcement shows that there are probably many other reasons for his request to step down, as well. The full text is given below.
I’ll note that Afif Safieh is himself a staunch son of Jerusalem, so the anguish he expresses over the plight of the Palestinian half of the city is probably very deep and very real.
In 1995, during the height of “Oslo fever” in the west, I traveled to Jerusalem and wrote a multi-part series for Al-Hayat on the tragic situation in the city. Prior to Oslo– and all during the first intifada, 1987-93– East Jerusalem had been a central node of Palestinian political activity. Intellectuals and activists based there could travel with remarkably few restrictions throughout the West Bank and throughout Israel, as well as into Gaza. Shortly after the conclusion of the Oslo Accords and the return of the PLO leadership to Palestine– but to Ramallah, not to Jerusalem– East Jeruslaem became surrounded by a ring of steel checkpoints as the Israelis worked to cut its 160,000 residents off from contact with the West Bank, and vice versa.
During those visits to Al- Quds in the 1990s, I often checked in with Afif’s sister, Diana Safieh, who ran a travel agency on Salahuddin Street and was active in the leadership of the East Jerusalem YWCA. She and her friends there gave me many details of the effect the ring of steel– and the continuous encroachment into East Jerusalem of Israeli settlements, large and small– was having on their lives.
Since then, the ring of checkpoints has been replaced with the even more suffocating Separation Barrier, 30 feet high and punctuated with guard towers, which cuts neighbor from neighbor throughout the Palestinian part of the city and looms like a concentration camp wall over many Palestinian neighborhoods. I can certainly understand where the angst that Safieh expresses about the city comes from. Back in 1995, I heard many similar expressions of anguish from Faisal al-Husseini (God rest his soul) about the degree to which the PLO/PA leadership had neglected Jerusalem’s Palestinians during their pursuit of the chimeric “peace process” of those days.
Here is Safieh’s announcement:

    PLO Mission, Washington, DC
    January 15, 2008
    Subject: Static Diplomacy
    From: PLO Mission – Washington, DC
    Afif Safieh, the Head of the PLO Mission, has returned to Washington from Palestine. While in Ramallah, Safieh attended the meetings with visiting President Bush / met with President Abbas/ with Prime Minister Salam Fayyad/ attended the meetings of the Fatah Council which discussed the situation in Gaza and the preparations for the Fatah Conference before Summer 2008/ visited Bili’in where a heroic protracted non-violent struggle is waged against settlement-building and land-confiscation and met with the entire leadership of the village/ attended the exquisite Daniel Barenboim piano concert in Ramallah where the size of audience again demonstrated Palestinian thirst for a life of normality or the semblance of normality…etc.
    Safieh deplored what he called “Static Diplomacy” in spite of the thousands of hours that are invested in talk about talks, negotiating pre- negotiations and pre- negotiating negotiations. On the ground the situation continues to deteriorate: the inhuman siege of the Gaza Strip and the daily bombardments, the frequent and repeated Israeli military incursions in the urban centers of the West Bank, settlement expansion mainly in and around occupied East Jerusalem and the number of the check-points that was not reduced strangulating the society and suffocating the economy.
    Safieh was distressed by the conditions in East Jerusalem, the future Capital of Palestine, a city politically orphaned by the death of the Faisal Husseni and the illegal closure of The Orient House. Safieh in a meeting with 12 personalities from Jerusalem took a commitment to constantly raise the issue of the necessary reopening of The Orient House as stipulated in the first phase of the Road Map.
    During his stay in Ramallah, Afif Safieh has asked President Abbas to relieve him, soon, during 2008, of his duties in Washington for health reasons. Safieh has suffered in 2006-2007 of a herniated disc and has undergone surgery last May.

Syria’s policy, post-Annapolis

The director of the Syrian Foreign Ministry’s Foreign Press Department
yesterday expressed disappointment with the outcome of the Arab-Israeli
peace conference held in Annapolis, Maryland, in late November. Syria
had sent its deputy foreign minister, Faisal Mikdad, to participate in
the conference.  But the Foreign Press department head, Ms. Bushra
Kanafani, told me in an exclusive interview yesterday that she was not sure where the process launched at Annapolis
was now headed. 

Ms. Kanafani expressed pessimism that the Palestinian-Israeli
negotiating track that was re-launched there was headed for success.
“As we see it” she said, “the priority for Palestinians is not in these
peace talks
but to make a reconciliation among the Palestinians themselves.”

At the time of Annapolis, Syria had scrapped plans to host a “summit
conference” involving Hamas and many other anti-Fateh Palestinian
movements.  That conference has now been rescheduled for January
23-25.  Ms. Kanafani was at pains to point out, though, that “its
aim is to rebuild Palestinian national unity…  Mr. Abbas has
been invited.”

Regarding the Syrian-Israeli track, she expressed no expectation that
anything would be happening in it any time soon.  A follow-up
session that the Russians– who are members of the US-led “Quartet”,
along with the UN and the EU– had considered holding in Moscow in
mid-January has not eventualized, and there are no other current
prospects for any activity on the Syrian-Israeli track.

At the time of the Annapolis talks, government leaders and
pro-government media in Tehran openly criticized the decision of the
Syriuan government– a long-time Tehran ally– to participate. 
Several analysts in the west meanwhile expressed the hope that
including Syria in the Annapolis process could succeed in “flipping”
Syria away from its relationship with Tehran.  But despite
those  Iranian criticisms of Damascus in November, that seems not
to have happened.  Ms. Kanafani noted in the interview that
throughout the whole period in the 1990s when Syria was actively
involved in peace negotiations with Israel, Damascus’s ties with Iran
were never broken, and she indicated she saw no reason for them to
suffer now.

Ms. Kanafani also discussed some intriguing aspects of
Syria’s burgeoning security relationship with the US-installed Iraqi
government.  She expressed Syria’s hope that the Arab League’s
attempt to resolve Lebanon’s lingering government crisis could soon be
successful.  She discussed Syria’s current views of its
relationships with Turkey (good) and Saudi Arabia (not so good.) 
She also expressed a view of the importance that Syria sees for the US
role in the peace process that would be surprising to those Americans
who consider Syria an implacable foe of US interests and influence in
the Middle East.

Less than two miles away from Ms. Kanafani’s office in the Foreign
Ministry, hundreds of Iraqi refugees were lined up in a large, well-run
reception facility the Syrian Red Crescent Society (SRCS) runs to
process their claims for the food boxes and other support the SRCS has
been giving to then regularly.  Large numbers of Iraqis– perhaps
more than one million– have found refuge in Syria from the turmoil and
sectarian killing that has plagued their homeland over the past three
years. Syria has also hosted hundreds of thousands of refugees from
Palestine for 60 years now, and in summer it 2006 hosted half a
million refugees from Israel’s assault on Lebanon.  The violence,
instability, and suffering in these neighboring Arab countries feels
very real indeed in Syria.

The text of Ms. Kanafani’s interview will follow. It is now here.

More on ‘Filipino Monkey’, need for hotline

The reporters Andrew Scutro and David Brown– writing for the Navy Times, no less– delved into some of the questions I raised here about who in the Navy decided to super-impose a separate audio onto the video of the Iranian patrol boats that was released last Tuesday, and why.
Well, the “why” of it anyway. They quote Chief of Naval Operations (i.e. the US’s highest-ranking naval officer) Adm. Gary Roughead as saying:

    “The reason there is audio superimposed over the video is it gives you a better idea of what is happening.”

However, he gave that answer in response to this question:

    When asked if U.S. officials considered whether the threats came from someone besides the Iranians when releasing the video and audio, Roughead said…

And that question never really did get answered…
But anyway, Roughead, like Bob Gates last week, was clearly supporting the decision to juxtapose the two separate tracks in the presentation released Tuesday.
Scutro & Brown’s article contains lots of quotes from U.S. Navy officers who have served in the Gulf that illustrate just how wide-open and insecure the existing radio channels of communication are. They therefore also illustrate how urgent it is to establish a secure, dedicated hot-line between the militaries of, in particular, the US and Iran.
They officers quoted make many references to a frequent radio-channel user who openly calls himself “Filipino Monkey”– which is, some of them say, a phrase used worldwide to denote someone who uses radio channels for unnecessary chatter. Scutro & Brown quote the spokeswoman for the 5th fleet in Bahrain as saying of the (threatening-sounding) audio transmissions used in the video compilation as released,

    “We don’t know for sure where they came from… It could have been a shore station.”

Anyway, good work, so far from the Navy Times, which is owned by Gannett, which is owned by McClatchy.
What would be even better would be if they– and other key opninion-shapers in the US– would start to agitate forcefully and openly for the establishment of hotlines and other robust deconfliction mechanisms in the Gulf. That need is still great, as evidence by the statement Israeli PM Olmert made yesterday, warning that even after his recent talks with Pres. Bush, “all options remain open” with regard to Iran’s nuclear program.
That is quite clear diplomatese for saying Israel may well still go ahead and bomb Iran’s nuclear installations or launch some other form of military attack against Iran.
Israel might do that itself, directly. Though Israeli planes would still need, at the very least, to have coordination with US military air-controllers if they want to reach Iran in one piece– and even more so, to reach home safely again afterwards. And anyway, if Israel did inflict a significant military strike on Iran, no-one in Iran including the highest leaders would believe that Israel had done this without US connivance. More especially so after GWB himself said he personally doesn’t really believe the December NIE.
Or, Israel might hope to have Iran attacked more effectively and more economically– from their standpoint– by sparking some form of provocation in the crowded waters of the Persian Gulf that, in the absence of secure communications between the US and Iranian navies, could rapidly jack-knife the whole region into the hell of an outright US-Iranian war.
Something that the professional militaries of neither country want. And neither do the great majority of the US (or Iranian) peoples.
Does George Bush understand the danger of these scenarios? Perhaps that is the scariest question of all to contemplate.

Rhetorical high points of Bush’s ME trip

The speech
that George W. Bush gave in Abu Dhabi January 13 was important
because it was the most authoritative articulation to date of  the
content of what the president and his officials have described as their
“freedom agenda” in the Middle East.  It goes quite a lot
further than any previous presentation given by the President himself.
in spelling out what the Bushites mean by their term “freedom
agenda”, which is currently the main narrative through
which they interpret developments in the Middle East, and which they
are also trying to promulgate among (or impose on) the peoles of the
region themselves.

The Abu Dhabi speech is titled Fostering
Freedom And Justice In The Middle East.  The version on
the White House, linked to above, includes a couple of explanatory
sentences at the top along with what appears to be the text that he
actually delivered, and it is hard to see where the main text actually
starts.  But here is how the first graf ends:

The President spoke
about the great new era that is unfolding, founded on the equality of
all people before God.  This new era offers hope for the millions
across the Middle East who seek a future of peace, progress, and
opportunity.  Unfortunately, these aspirations for liberty and
justice
are being threatened by extremists who murder the innocent in pursuit
of power.

That, in a nutshell, is Bush’s argument. Interesting to see his use of
the phrase “liberty and justice” there, isn’t it?  It is taken
directly from the U.S. Constitution [update: oops! the US “Pledge of Allegiance”, thanks Vadim!]— and was a big theme of our
conference there in Beirut last week.  But the phrase was abused
in truly Orwellian fashion in Bush’s speech. (And no, I don’t think he
was using it with any ironic intent.  I’m not sure the guy even
knows what irony is.)

He then proceeds through the following topics, presented as subheads in
the posted text:

  1.  Extremists Are Fomenting Instability In The Middle East
  2. The Desire For Freedom And Justice Is The Greatest Weapon In The
    Fight Against Violent Extremists
  3. America Is Using Its Influence To Foster Peace And Reconciliation
    In The Holy Land

Well, I largely agree with the first two of these arguments– though
I disagree strongly with Bush’s identification of who the violent, 
instability-fostering extremists are.

Continue reading “Rhetorical high points of Bush’s ME trip”

Syria, Annapolis, and after

The winter weather is cold, bright, and beautiful here in
Damascus.  On Thursday night there was a huge public
firework display, launched from most of the length of the
restaurant-studded road that runs along near the top of the massive
mountain that shlters Damascus from the northwest, Jebel
Kassioun.  The fireworks were celebrating the beginning of the
year during
which Damascus has been designated– by the Arab League– to be the
“Arab Cultural Capital”.

The diplomatic arena that the government here is trying to navigate
is decidedly less sparkling. Back in late November President Bashar al-Asad made a
last-minute decision that
Syria (though not he personally) would participate in the Israeli-Arab
“summit” meeting that President Bush convened in
Annapolis.  That was not an easy decision, coming after many years
of
active US hostility to Syria and seven years of intentional US
stonewalling on Syria’s
repeated requests for the resumption of Syrian-Israeli peace
negotiations.  Indeed, on several occasions over recent years,
when
high-level figures in the Israeli government started discussing
the possibility of resuming the negotiations on this track, those
exploratory feelers were nipped smartly in the bud by the Bush
administration– particularly by Bush’s NSC person running Middle East
affairs, the notorious Elliott Abrams, and by people in VP Dick
Cheney’s office.

Syria’s decision to go to Annapolis was also a tough one because it was
strongly opposed by the Iranians, who have been key allies of Syria
ever since the 1978 Islamic Revolution in Iran. And it was politically
quite controversial at home in Syria, too, given the depth of
anti-American feeling here.

But Asad made the decision to take part, in line with his (and before
him, his father’s) longheld diplomatic position of strong commitment to
seeking a negotiated settlement to the 60-year state of war with
Israel, including crucially Israel’s complete withdrawal from the
portions of sovereign Syria that it has occupied since 1967.

Continue reading “Syria, Annapolis, and after”

More on today’s “Tonkin” from Lobe

Jim Lobe suggests that the Pentagon’s release last Tuesday of a fear-inducing report (backed up by audio and video) of Iranian patrol boats allegedly threatening US Navy ships in the Persian Gulf may have been part of a sophisticated ploy by the military (as opposed to civilian) leaders there to force the administration to conclude an “incidents at sea” agreement with the Iranian navy. Such an agreement would most likely include the kind of hot-line agreement I have been arguing for for a long time, but would probably also go further than that in defining procedures to de-escalate any tensions that may arise from the close operations of these two navies in the Gulf and in particular in their narrow entry channel, the strategically vital Straits of Hormuz.
I blogged here yesterday about the seriousness of the “scare video” incident, the need for urgent and full congressional investigations into who released the misleading video footage on Tuesday and why, and the need to prevent further unintended escalations through the establishment of a secure hotline between the two navies.
Lobe writes:

    I wonder whether this was the Pentagon’s equivalent of the intelligence community’s NIE on Iran’s nuclear program.
    … [T]he timing of the Pentagon’s decision to publicize what really an apparently not-particularly-threatening incident involving Revolutionary Guard speedboats is particularly intriguing as I suspect there have been more serious incidents in the recent past. [HC comment: there have been.] Frustrated until now in their efforts to get the White House to authorize negotiations over a new agreement, could it be that [Centcom chief Adm William] Fallon (who worked very hard to improve military ties — sometimes over the objections of Donald Rumsfeld — with China as the commander of the Ninth Fleet), Cosgriff, and other Pentagon and Navy officials decided to dramatize the danger just as Bush was embarking on his trip, anticipating that the president would get an earful from his Gulf state hosts about their fears that a naval confrontation could quickly escalate into a real war in which they would suffer significant collateral damage?

An interesting hypothesis, to be sure. Also, if this was indeed the back-story, then the fact that Secdef Gates backed up the seriousness of the brass’s warnings about this event could also mean he supports their campaign to win an “incidents at sea” agreement.
Lobe also very helpfully links to this September column by the always well-informed David Ignatius, who wrote:

    America’s top military commanders in the Gulf favor an “incidents at sea” agreement with Iran that would reduce the danger of a confrontation… An unexpected opportunity for discussion occurred last weekend, when Central Command’s naval chief, Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, appeared on a panel with the brother of the commander of the Revolutionary Guard. This chance encounter at a Geneva meeting of the International Institute for Strategic Studies should be pursued.
    The United States and Iran are playing a game of “chicken” in the Middle East. A collision would be ruinous for both. Each side needs to be careful to avoid miscalculation and to act in ways that avert a crackup.

If the Lobe version of this incident is correct, then I would judge that issuing the very misleading, if not actually mendacious, “scare video” on Tuesday was still an extremely unwise and inflammatory thing for these guys– or anyone else in the Pentagon– to do. Not least because the US presidential campaign is now in full swing, and any hints that Iranian naval forces might be preparing a showdown with the massive US naval presence in the Gulf can clearly be expected to be demagogued to the hilt by the candidates– especially those on the Republican side.
This McClatchy report (hat-tip Juan Cole) from a GOP debate in South Carolina gives us a taste of how the GOP hopefuls dealt with the issue. Only the admirable Ron Paul retained some sense of good sense and dignity. He referred directly to the Gulf of Tonkin incident and said, “I would certainly urge a lot more caution than I’m hearing here tonight.” Candidate Mitt Romney then “cracked that Paul should stop reading Iranian propaganda.” (Ho, ho, ho. Why am I not amused?)
Well, the crucial goal I see in all this is still the establishment of a much more robust deconfliction regime in the crowded naval arena of the Gulf. Certainly including a hot-line agreement but also, yes, a broader “incidents at sea” agreement would be good, too. I don’t know how broad an agreement can be reached there in the absence of much broader political discussions between Washington and Tehran over the whole range of their current disagreements. But surely, at the very least, they could agree to establish a secure, dedicated channel of communication that is not subject to the same kind of external intrusion/intervention that their existing channels are.
As to the prospect of congressional investigations– yes, I still think these would be excellent. But they should focus as much on the urgent need for a hotline and other deconfliction mechanisms going forward as on investigating the still very murky past history of the compiling, authorizing, and issuance of the scare video.