OPINION:
A major theme of President Bush’s trip to the Middle East will be working with Arab governments to isolate Iran, and Tehran and its jihadist allies have been sending a few messages of their own to president. The Pentagon has released a new videotape and audiotapes of a Sunday morning incident in which Iranian boats swarmed U.S. warships in the Strait of Hormuz. The video, which lasts 4 minutes and 20 seconds, shows five Iranian boats appearing to ignore repeated warnings from U.S. vessels to stop. “I am coming to you,” says an Iranian, whose voice can be heard on the tape. “I am coming to you. … [Y]ou will explode after… minutes.” The Iranian boats, which were believed to have been operated by the Iranian navy, turned away just as the much larger American ships were about to fire at them in self-defense. U.S. forces in the region have been on a heightened state of alert since March 23, when the Iranian naval force seized a British ship and held 15 sailors in custody for nearly two weeks.
Yesterday, as the president met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in an effort to revive peace negotiations aimed at achieving a Palestinian state by next year, allies of Iran and Syria made it clear that they have a very different agenda. The Popular Resistance Committees, a Hamas-linked terror organization in Gaza, rained rockets and mortar shells onto an Israeli town. Israel responded with raids that killed two persons and wounded four.
While Mr. Bush presses ahead with peace negotiations launched two months in Annapolis, those talks with Israelis and Palestinians have made little headway, and the president, who will visit Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, will clearly be devoting much of his time to damage control: specifically, convincing Israel and Arab countries that the recently issued National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran had halted its covert nuclear arms program in 2003, does not represent official U.S. policy, and that the United States is not about to abandon the region to Iranian dominance. “Part of the reason I’m going to the Middle East is to make it abundantly clear to nations in that part of the world that we view Iran as a threat, and that the [NIE] in no way lessons that threat, but clarifies that threat,” Mr. Bush told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot.
In recent days, Iranian and Syrian officials have publicly taunted Mr. Bush, telling him that his efforts to push forward the peace process and persuade Arab nations to stand against Iran are doomed to failure. The president should try to prove them wrong.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.