First major challenge of the LOST treaty.

January 7, 2008 the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s navy decided to challenge the United States Navy, with fast moving small attack boats in the Straits of Hormuz, a narrow (30 mile) waterway bordering Iran. Iran and the United States of America are both signers to the “Law of the Sea Treaty”, but neither has moved to ratification. At one time, both countries invoked an 11-mile limit to their waters, but with the new LOST treaty, it seems that Iran has chosen to test the new limits of up to 350 miles. Iran’s foreign ministry has called the confrontation a “normal” and was resolved; they went on to say that their Navy didn’t recognize the United States vessels. The US Navy Frigate, Destroyer and Cruiser were busy acquiring firing solutions after the attack on the USS Cole in 2000 while in port in Yemen. The speedboats came within 500 yards of the Navy vessels, despite the rather large numbers that the navy has always displayed on all their ships.
One has to question a treaty that has been endorsed by Senator Joe Biden (DE) that encourages challenges such as this by rogue nations such as Iran. With increasing tensions in our world today, we should be looking at ways to avoid conflict instead of encouraging it. If Iran supposedly couldn’t identify our crafts, they could just as easily declare them “Pirate Ships” and detain them. This might not be a far fetched an idea at all as we remember the Iranian hostages taken from our embassy who were supposedly “diplomatically immune to detention.” Why should we give them a reason to detain our ships under a veiled excuse of “misidentification.?” We should not ratify this self-defeating law, which languishes in our senate right now. Ronald Reagan once referred to the LOST treaty as; ”this is why the people elected us…….to refuse bad treaties like this.” Not a lot has changed since then, minor wording, but nothing of substance. I encourage you to join hundreds of thousands of Americans that have already signed a petition to deny the Senate ratification of the LOST treaty.

http://www.grassfire.org/95/petition.asp