Tanker War: Iran Lost Big When It Took on the U.S. Navy

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

45% : As Iran counterattacked into Iraqi territory, Baghdad -- supplied and armed by the Soviet Union, France, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia -- began blasting Iranian oil tankers with missiles, often with assistance from U.S. surveillance assets.
41% : On July 23, Tehran rumbled that tanker was carrying "prohibited goods" but made no obvious moves U.S. intelligence had learned of Iranian plans to attack the convoy with motorboats operated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy.
38% : As the Bridgeton cruised eighteen miles west of Iran's Farsi Island on the morning of July 24, she abruptly struck what resembled a spiked-ball chained to the sea floor -- a variant of an old Soviet M-08 mine built by North Korea and exported to Iran.
37% : The Tanker War demonstrated how Iran could retaliate against foreign pressure through calibrated, and semi-deniable attacks on the valuable shipping passing through the narrow waters of the Gulf -- even though the campaign failed to inflict substantial economic damage, or indeed sink many large ships.
37% : Iran retaliated by targeting Kuwaiti tankers with imported Chinese Silkworm missiles.
37% : The Tanker War demonstrated how Iran could retaliate against foreign pressure through calibrated, and semi-deniable attacks on the valuable shipping passing through the narrow waters of the Gulf -- even though the campaign failed to inflict substantial economic damage, or indeed sink many large ships.
36% : But Washington had an axe to grind with Tehran, not Baghdad -- and decided to respond to pleas for military escort from Kuwait.
36% : A less violent variant of this strategy has evidently been implemented by Tehran today in its harassment and sabotage of shipping in the Gulf.
33% : The narrow straits of the Persian Gulf had become a shooting gallery due to the Iran-Iraq War, still raging seven years after Iraq's surprise invasion of Iran in 1980.
33% : The narrow straits of the Persian Gulf had become a shooting gallery due to the Iran-Iraq War, still raging seven years after Iraq's surprise invasion of Iran in 1980.

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