I don’t know if these Iranian knuckle heads are still riding high off the kidnapping and parading of Great Britain’s sailors, but they are in for a surprise if they keep playing around the the U.S. Navy:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “Ain’t I A Stinker?”

In the most serious such incident in years, U.S. forces were on the verge of firing on the Iranian boats during the incident early Sunday, when the boats — believed to be from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s navy — turned and moved away, a Pentagon official said.

The Iranians said there was nothing out of the ordinary here, and that the Iranian boats had simply not recognized the United States ships.

What?

So, it’s perfectly normal for a bunch of Iranian boats to come screaming across the water at ships they don’t recognize? Is that how the Iranian Revolutionary Guard engages on the high seas? By dropping boxes into the water in front of warships? They are lucky:

There were no injuries but the official said there could have been, because the Iranian boats turned away “literally at the very moment that U.S. forces were preparing to open fire” in self defense.

The official, who asked to speak on grounds of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly, said he didn’t have the precise transcript of communications that passed between the two forces, but said the Iranians radioed something like “we’re coming at you and you’ll explode in a couple minutes.”

This is a dangerous game they are playing and I think the captain made a mistake in his or her inaction. This was clearly a limit testing activity. We should set the limits very clearly. Next time those boxes might be something more.