Ugh, the arrogance.

When there are so many too choose from abroad?

Iran is doing what all failing governments do, redirecting the ire of their people to someone other than itself. Granted they have had their "Great Satan" for many many years the uprisings and home grown terrorism does show the state cannot control all factions present within its borders.

So they need to have their people believe that all fault is outside of the country while at the same time explaining the lack of living standards and such is the great sacrifice needed to uphold Iranian values and freedom in the face of the great enemies abroad. Wow, sounds like North Korea as well.

Iran is the dog on the other side of the fence, barking and slavering to get at you. Yes it has teeth and yes it will hurt, but its going to get such an ass kicking it really enjoys that fence as much as you do.

With all the exaggerated press in the US about war mongering politicians its not exactly reassuring to see that there are still so many crazies abroad to give the locals reason. Iran is threatening more than the US with this boast of closing the straights. Perhaps they are trying to wake their Iman they so desperately need.... most likely a failing leader most likely needs the crisis and possibly the war to stay in power.

I know about the "risk" of nuclear proliferation, but as we did nothing about Kim Il Jong for decades in North Korea, I think the fears of Iran having nukes are over-rated. If a blustering blow-hard like Kim could threaten his neighbours repeatedly with invasion and war without reprise, why is the Iranian rhetoric considered any worse?

Certainly Iran executes a lot of people for violating a strict interpretation of Islamic law, so anyone who's against religion in government has a fundamental problem with Iran. But invasion is a poor way of protecting the people from a government that places dogma over reason. Surely diplomatic discourse would be more effective than the threat of invasion.

And that's really the problem I see. The US keeps beating the invasion and war drums. Iran refuses to back down, the mouse that roared at the lion. Neither side seems willing to act rationally.

If you're going to constantly go on about invading a nation, yeah, they're gonna get paranoid about BEING invaded. They're going to want to build up their military and their armaments to fight back, including nukes.

And with Israel and it's nukes so close to Iran and clearly a darling of US policy, the threat to Iran is imminent, at least from their perspective. Mind you, the Iranian government doesn't help that situation with their ongoing diatribe against Israel. More bluster that escalates instead of negotiates.

Recent US history is a track record of invasion and attack for reasons that turned out to be unjustified in the end. It doesn't give me a comfortable feeling to see them dictating policy to Iran when the US handling of Cuba has shown that appeasing the US does NOT mean the sanctions will be dropped.

Maybe if someone were to take a serious step like disarming Israel's nuclear arsenal, things could settle down in the middle east.

Also remember the words that got a general in trouble in Iraq: "This isn't the war we were expecting to fight.", or something to that effect.

Militaries are notoriously bad about preparing to fight the last war again. Or the war before last... The US has spent most of the last 65 years spending petabucks preparing to refight WWII (vs. the Russians) in central Europe and the Japanese navy at sea.

Or worse, "Fuck with us and your voters will be paying ten dollars a gallon for gasoline."

Kind of like the USA's warmongering politicians are doing with Iran?

I'm sure China would be delighted to see us throw away a few trillion dollars on another war that won't gain us anything except bad PR. We can sell them some more of our assets to pay for it.

And is selling it for Rial and Euros, not dollars. Their oil bourse just last year started trading crude.

That's why they have to be "liberated".

Oh yeah? That's why NK keeps getting food aid & SK keeps trying to appease them with promises of trade agreements, right?

No. The ugly fact is that WMD regimes have (NK, Pakistan) and will gain (Iran, others) the power to blackmail first world countries with relative impunity.

In the long run, we're fucked. We'll have to either keep paying and praying for "velvet revolutions" in those countries to disarm them, or risk a hugely dangerous first-strike WW3 (hopefully without getting the BRIC up in our faces).

While all this is true, the interpretation of the events you are getting out of it is misleading.

The guy did the equivalent of the "zerg rush". Essentially, by skirting way up against the "rules envelope" he exploited a spike in effectiveness. It was not realistic, because Iran building a bunch of boats like that is sure to pop up on intelligence somewhere, if they even HAVE that many boats. It's not like they can go down to Haji's Marine and order 160 Yamaha outboard motors at a moment's notice. Plus, there's a whole other monkey barrel of complications and details they'd have to overcome. Like, so you need a missile, but now you need more electrical power on that little 21 foot boat, and it makes it top heavy, and , and, and.... If anything, they'd end up destroying half their missile effectiveness because they lose the fucking things off the end of the dock. What Iran DOES have, is a weak attempt at a modern navy with the same sorts of procurement problems (they buy used Russian, North Korean, and Chinese stuff and refit the hulls, just now, they are finally getting around to learning how to build sub hulls).

The game was re-started because, yes, there is a power spike there at one end of the envelope, but that's not what the game is about and since it's not a free-form unsupervised game between 14 year-olds on the internet, but rather done to actually learn something useful. So the game was re-done to fit the context of the information they were after. Yes, ha-ha clever neato nerd beat the big guys. Now that is old news, guess what, the big guys got answers for your dumb little boat scenario now. Come up with something new.

YOU should go re-read the events, and then go read a bunch more about the overall security and war-making capabilities of the two countries, and realize there's very little Iran can do that we won't see first. (Remember the recent drone incidents?)

Don't laugh. Google on the battle the UK had over the Falkland Islands. Both sides quickly pulled their big ships to rear safe zones when they realized little, cheap ( in comparison ) missiles could make short work of huge, expensive ships.

I might have missed it and and couldn't find anything on Google about it either but if you can educate me here a bit that would be greatly appreciated. The questions are:

How many foreign countries has the "Lunatics in Tehran" invaded. How many times have they even threaten other countries by parking their carriers off of the coast of another country? How many bases do they have in foreign countries? Do you know of any country the lunatics in Tehran has bombed with Jet aircraft? How many pre-emptive wars have they started? What about drones. How many countries do they currently have drones operating in? What about their medium and long-range missile toys? Where have they tried those toys.

There's more but I'll stop there for now.

That is a pretty iffy tactic at best.
And I feel you would be very mistaken if you think that nothing was learned from that.
Here is one way that it would probably go down IHMO.
The US fleet except would stand off outside of cruise missile range except for forward deployed Submarines.
F-18 and land based F-16s, F15s, and F-22s would hunt any recon aircraft that are sent out to locate the fleet. While ATACMS are moved to the coast for counter battery fire on SAM sites and land based cruise missiles.
Any ships of the Iranian navy that stay in port will be targeted with ATACMS and Tomahawks. Any ships at see will be hit by Harpoons. B-2s, B-1s, and B-52s will take out command and control, air fields, and radar sites using stand off weapons. While P-3s, Seahawks, and Seawolf class subs hunt the Kilo class subs and 688is and Ohio Class SGNs get into position for Tomahawk strikes.
Once Iran's sensors are degraded the US will us helicopters to mimic the fleet. They will fly low and slow and us radar repeaters to look like large ships. When the Iranians fire at those targets their radars will be taken out by HARMS and the missile sites by JDAMS, JSOWS or ATACMs depending on the location.
At that point the fleet can move closer and any remaining anti ship missiles should be taken care of by the CGs and DDGs escorting the carriers.
The Iranian fleet will be gone, The Iranian air force will be gone. The on threat left will be from their mobile ballistic missiles so we will see how well SM-3s and PAC-3s really work but if they do work as well as expected and if the launchers are within range of ATACMS for counter battery fire then the Iranian air and navy forces will no longer be a threat and any land forces they use to attack with will be vulnerable to air strikes.
I left out the UAVs which will be used to watch for and take out any small boats and to map radar sites for strikes.
And that is just using publicly available data.

Everyone is paying for it except the oil companies, their profiting by it, it's called rising oil prices. Whilst the US dicks about with sanctions against Iran as a result of pressure from Israeli campaign contributors and of course multi-national oil companies, Iran strikes back by making empty noises further driving up oil prices.

Has not everyone learned their lesson by now, this has nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction and everything to do with Israeli land profiteers and Texas oil companies. Another chance for Israel via it's zombie puppet nation the US to cripple a country in the region and increase it's own power and of course another chance to pump an extra few billion dollars of profit for the oil companies with an inflated oil price.

They have been lobbying for this war for the last four years, constantly keeping the bullshit flowing via some of the most unscrupulous US politicians imaginable, willing to kill thousands of people for thousands in campaign contributions. Military contractors a chomping at the bit to make billions more disappear just like in Iraq and the US military industrial complex is under threat of real cuts and desperately need another war to fend those threatened cuts off.

Reality is if the Iranian Qader cruise missle was actually good just like every other munitions producing country in the world they would be selling them to the highest bidder. China is trading arms with Iran and Russia will be back into the game. As the US becomes more cash strapped and foreign debt crippled, the more weapons spread around for it to chase just cripple it further. Whilst Russia and China will profit selling arms around the world, the US will spend billions stomping around making lots of noises, as corporate lobbyists send it staggering around the world in search of war profits.

And you prove my point about stupidity.

The US has eleven carriers.........China only needs eleven hyper velocity anti-ship missiles.....but lets triple that, to be on the safe side shall we ?

In a "proper" shooting match most of the US Navy will end up on the bottom of the ocean, maybe even radioactive. Of course, it will be joining the Russian and Chinese fleets too...but the damage will have been done.

It's a whole different ballgame when the enemy starts shooting back, ain't it boy ?

You seem to be assuming that the Iranian's don't have any high tech weapons and ECM, but clearly that isn't true. They managed to steal one of your drones only recently using purely technical means. They have satellites too you know.

Their air force has some fairly modern gear too and you brush over some major threats like their sub fleet which you seem to assume, again wrongly, will be effortless for your navy to destroy. Even Iraq's really old and crappy SAM sites took out a few of your jets so what makes you think you will mop up Iran's far better ones? Your idea for the fleet to "stand off outside of cruise missile range" won't work either due to the geography and politics of the area of the area.

Plus your military has shown a reluctance to use expensive weapons when they can send some cheaper ones in. Why were you fighting tank-to-tank when long range missiles were available in Iraq? Why send bombers to hit static targets when you have cruise missiles? Sometimes I think you guys just need to justify having all that stuff.

This is why the US gets its ass kicked in war games and still loses aircraft to guys with shoulder mounted missiles in very low tech countries. Your technology gives you some advantage but is not unique in the world, and it is far from 100% reliable and even if it was the fog of war is still very real. You assume you will kick ass so forget to us the kinds of strategies and tactics that end up being used against you.

Iran doesn't invade countries, they train and fund terrorists instead. Lebanon and Iraq are good examples

Essentially what we have right now is a problem because the US changed the balance of power the middle east when they invaded Iraq and now it's out of whack and Iran no longer has any real countering force. I'm betting the idea at this point is to pummel Iran into the dark ages and hope Turkey emerges as the new dominant power.

If Iran blockades the Strait, political will won't be a problem. No matter what you think of war and peace, globalism and economics, the reality is that a blockade of one of the most important waterways on the planet will most assuredly bring a firestorm to Iran, one that that country could not hope to weather.

Somehow I don't think Iran's intention is to start a shooting war with the US; its real intention is to be a thorn in our side and eventually cripple us economically. Looks like it's working too; they're using the Reagan strategy of bankrupting the enemy by forcing them to build up their arms, except they're doing it asymetrically: they build a fleet of tiny speedboats with missile launchers for peanuts, and we spend billions on super-high-tech countermeasures. All they have to do is keep presenting themselves as a threat that we need to expend tons of money and resources to be vigilant against, and eventually our house of cards will collapse.

Personally, I'm rooting for the Iranians. If we're so stupid that we can't keep our noses out of that part of the world, then we deserve to go bankrupt and have our economy destroyed. Maybe if we'd start electing politicians who actually downsize the bloated military and engage in diplomacy and making our nation energy-independent, we wouldn't have these problems.