The nerve.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – “Iran is challenging U.S. naval power in the Middle East with an array of offensive and defensive weapons, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Monday.

” ‘Iran is combining ballistic and cruise missiles, anti-ship missiles, mines, and swarming speedboats in order to challenge our naval power in that region,’ Gates told a conference of U.S. Navy advocates outside Washington.

“Gates did not elaborate on the perceived Iranian threat.”

What moxie. The Iranians dare to assume they are an independent, sovereign nation with the right to protect themselves from an armed and ever-present threat to their security. They even want to patrol their own territory and have the unmitigated gall to think they can challenge our naval power in their backyard. With swarms of speedboats, no less.

Let’s change some of the nouns and names in the excerpt above and see how much sense it makes. [Note: the following is a complete fabrication. While that should be obvious, I don’t dare assume every reader will understand that fact and so include this disclaimer.]

“After years of Iranian-begun wars in various countries bordering the United States, it seems the US is beginning to flex its muscles. While Iran has built a 700 billion dollar embassy in Arlington, Virginia and installed military bases in Maryland, Texas, New York and Montana, the US has heretofore been content to level only occasional veiled references to the unease it feels with the robust military force Iran displays. Even the drone-bombing of neighboring Canada only brought out a few anonymous comments from high-level American officials.

“These comments provoked much disdain from the current Iranian administration, one member of which was heard to say in a televised remark, ‘If they [the US] were to make a move, we’d bomb them back to the stone age.’ A high-ranking Iranian military official told a gathering of his subordinates, ‘They [US citizens] are ants. When the time comes, you crush them.’

“Lately, however, the US has been accused by Iran of plans to detonate a nuclear weapon within Iran, an accusation that the Obama administration vehemently denies. In what is clearly an attempt to intimidate the Iranians into believing the US has some military strength, the US has recently sent Navy vessels into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. ‘These are simply naval exercises,’ claimed President Obama, adding that the waters where the US Navy were conducting their exercises were reasonably and traditionally considered parts of US territory. An anonymous source close to the Obama administration told this reporter that concern was growing about the covert influence of the Iranian secret service into US politics and suggested that the spate of recent ‘accidental’ drone-bombings in New York and the unsolved deaths of several Congressmen might have actually been secret Iranian operations. ‘They need to know we have some military force available to us,’ said the source, ‘and that we are tired of Iran meddling in our politics and creating false wars so close to our borders. It’s obvious they intend to invade us next and it’s only reasonable that we would not want that to happen.’

“In response to the US naval exercises, Iran threatened sanctions against the US, urging the rest of the Middle Eastern nations to join it, citing the exercises as proof that the US indeed had intentions of preemptive nuclear strike against the region.

“While international weapons inspectors have reported many times in recent years that the US has in fact disabled its nuclear warheads, as per the new international regulations imposed by Iran, Iran does not believe those reports to be true. ‘We have seen swarms of motorboats in the Gulf of Mexico, cleverly disguised as fishing or recreational vessels. Clearly, one would be a fool to believe these fundamentalist Christians, who want nothing less than the Armageddon they always long for, and which their Bible preaches,’ Iran’s leader scolded in his weekly radio address to his citizens. He went on to mention the high incarceration rate in the United States and the overly zealous use of tasering and beatings of civilians by US police forces, as well as the continued bailing out of America’s oligarchic financial sector as examples of the lawlessness of the American government.”