MUCH OF THE world's oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz, a key strategic chokepoint connecting the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean. When five Iranian small craft conducted threatening maneuvers there against three United States naval ships Sunday morning, the Iranians came perilously close to provoking a lethal response. The American ships received a radio message over the conventional bridge-to-bridge radio channel saying, "I am coming at you, and you will explode in a few minutes." Had the Iranian gunboats not turned away at the last second, they would have been fired upon.
It is not clear whether the challenge from the Iranian speedboats reflects a policy decided at the highest levels of the Islamic Republic or an initiative by the Revolutionary Guards who man those boats. In either case, the Bush administration should send a carefully crafted message to the real power center in Tehran - Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader. President Bush should leave no doubt that America does not want an armed conflict with Iran and should call for agreed-upon rules for avoiding similar confrontations in the future.
Suggesting the Guards were responsible for the Sunday incident, Admiral Gary Roughead, chief of US naval operations, said during a Monday visit to the Globe, "Professional navies do not operate that way." In the past, he noted, contacts between Iranian and US naval officers had been cordial and correct.
The Revolutionary Guards were responsible for seizing 15 British sailors who had been policing smuggling in the gulf last spring. Officers in the Guards are generally more doctrinaire than their counterparts in the Iranian army and navy, and are more the regime's hard-line security enforcers than professional warriors observing a universal military code of conduct.
The threats against US ships Sunday might have been mounted primarily as way to learn about US naval defenses. That challenge might also reflect an attempt on behalf of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his hard-line cohort to reignite tensions with Washington at a time when they have been decreasing, partly as a result of a US intelligence estimate saying that Iran suspended efforts to design and engineer nuclear warheads in 2003.
Ahmadinejad, a onetime Guards commander, benefits politically from revived US-Iran tensions. With those tensions easing, he is under fire for his economic mismanagement - even from the often-detached Khamenei.
Bush should make it clear to Khamenei that America wants to reach an explicit understanding with Tehran about the movement of naval vessels in the Strait of Hormuz and the gulf. The last thing the world needs is an avoidable, or accidental, military conflict in the gulf between the United States and Iran.
