Iran: US Forces ‘Unprofessional’ in Gulf Operations

Responding to yesterday’s Pentagon condemnation of the Iranian navy as “unprofessional and unsafe” over claims that they’d pointed a gun at a US helicopter looming off the Iranian coast, but didn’t shoot at it, Iranian officials today insisted that the US forces are the “unprofessional” ones.

An official with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards told the nation’s Tasnim news agency that “everybody knows that the main problem in the Persian Gulf is the US presence,” noting that everyone else seems to be able to get their ships through the Strait of Hormuz with no difficulty, and the US is the only one constantly complaining.

The US ships and helicopters largely aren’t passing through the strait, of course. Rather, the US has made it a matter of policy to park ships off Iran’s coast for years, as they constantly threaten to attack Iran over various grievances. Whenever those US military ships or helicopters get too close to Iran’s territorial waters, Iranian boats move into the same general area, which outrages the Pentagon to no end.

Iran does have a point, however. Despite many of the Gulf states being openly hostile to Iran, none of them ever seems to have these problems with Iran’s navy of small coastal boats, and have to come up with whole different reasons to be mad at them.