Dear Pentagon: Your Mine Story Isn't Selling
To the esteemed public relations department at the Pentagon, we at The Piaz read your recent dispatch about sinking sixteen Iranian mine-laying ships with a certain weariness. You assure us these actions were a pre-emptive necessity, a direct response to unnamed ‘mines’ in the Strait of Hormuz. Your narrative hinges on an implicit threat that Iran was about to destabilize a critical global
chokepoint, forcing the benevolent US Navy to intervene. Convenient, isn't it, how these threats always seem to materialize precisely when Washington seeks a pretext for further militarization, mirroring the Gulf of Tonkin incident that launched a full-scale war in Vietnam? Perhaps you’ve forgotten the 1988 downing of Iran Air Flight 655, where a US warship 'mistook' a civilian airliner for an
F-14 fighter, killing all 290 on board, including 66 children. That act of 'self-defense' was never adequately accounted for, much like the phantom evidence of Iranian aggression today. While you trot out tales of submerged menace, the reality remains that for 45 years, US foreign policy has been a relentless campaign of sanctions, proxy destabilization, and military encirclement against Iran.
Your 'defensive' posture is merely the latest chapter in a long history of imperial overreach, designed to cement US-Israeli dominance in a region already ravaged by your interventions, from the million-plus Iraqi lives lost post-2003 to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, where over 680,000 Palestinians, including 380,000 infants, have been systematically exterminated. This constant drumbeat of