April 24, 2012
The USS Enterprise as Bait
A Persian Gulf of Tonkin in the Making?
The aircraft carrier Enterprise has
moved into the Persian Gulf, although it’s an antique, slow-moving
target and a potential lightening rod for war on Iran. As a retired Navy
man told me last month, “A couple of torpedoes would stagger the thing,
and then you’ve got the Alamo, the Maine, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin and 9/11 all over again,” he said, “with Iran in the crosshairs.”
Enterprise needlessly joins the strike group of the 100,000-ton carrier Lincoln with
its crew of 3,200 already in the Gulf. TV-Novosti reported April 10
that in March President Obama sent his second amphibious assault group
to the Gulf. Those gun boats include a nuclear submarine, a Marine
helicopter squadron and more than 2,000 Marines.
At 51, Enterprise is the oldest ship in the Navy, having
seen action since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. From the bombing of
Laos in 1973 and the 1986 bombing of Libya, to the 800,000 pounds of
munitions it fired into Afghanistan in 2001, Enterprise has helped maintain a string of atrocity producing situations that has no end in sight.
Set for retirement and decommissioning this fall, Enterprise’s Gulf
deployment is its last. But it has no purpose whatsoever as a war
machine when 11 newer and more sophisticated carriers are available.
Indeed Enterprise is a hugely expensive liability, a deadly
heap of hazardous scrap. Its fiercely radioactive reactors and waste
fuel require dangerous and costly removal and long-term isolation from
the ecosphere as nuclear waste material.
So Enterprise, the first ever nuclear-powered carrier, parades
through the Gulf with lots of gunpowder. Its “strike group 12” consists
of: Carrier Air Wing 1; the guided-missile cruiser Vicksburg; and Destroyer Squadron 2, comprising guided-missile destroyers Nitze, Porter and James E. Williams. Enterprise is
1,123 feet long, weighs 94,000 tons, has 8 propulsion reactors, four
35-ton rudders, two gyms, a crew of at least 3,100, a television station
and—no doubt demonstrating a free press— a daily paper.
The government knows its loss at sea would be cheaper than
retirement, and if it can scare the country into yet another shooting
war, our munitions makers and weapons merchants continue swimming in
billions of tax dollars defending freedom and peace. In January, when
Sec. of Defense Leon Panetta first said he would send Enterprise to
the Gulf “to send a direct message to Iran,” the price of gas shot up
and stayed up. You’d almost think the oil giants like war. The
privatized DoD contractor corporations certainly do.
To get public opinion and NATO behind war on Iran, the war party
needs to both sideline our Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan Syndromes and
to flabbergast Russia, China and India. How better than to make it look
as if Iran started it? Deployment of theEnterprise is
hair-raising in the context of previous “false flag” provocations in the
region. Like the Lavon Affair before it, Israel actually attacked the
U.S. spy ship Liberty June 8, 1967 — using unmarked
jet fighters and torpedoes — initially blaming Egypt in an attempt to
draw Washington into the war. Israel later claimed it attacked what it
thought was an Egyptian ship, yet no one was charged or disciplined.
Ward Boston, the U.S. Navy Senior Counsel for the Court of Inquiry, says
in a 2002 affidavit, “Both [lead investigator] Admiral [Isaac] Kidd and
I believed with certainty that this attack, which killed 34 sailors and
injured 172, was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and
murder its entire crew.”
Today the Enterprise has nothing to do but act like the
greasiest sitting duck in history. No one should believe that Iran is
dumb enough to take the bait.
John LaForge is on the staff of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog and anti-war group in Wisconsin, and edits its Quarterly.
