WASHINGTON (Rooters agency) – In a move designed to contrast the United States’ peaceful intentions with Iranian belligerence, the US government today released a series of videos of US rocket firings.
The new videos follow the release last week of US Navy videos which the Navy said showed Iranian vessels firing rockets “in close proximity” to US vessels, including an aircraft carrier and guided missile destroyer, plus a French frigate.
The Iranian rocket firings occurred in the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that separates Iran from the Arabian Peninsula and links the Persian Gulf with the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. The strait is only 33 miles wide at its narrowest point, so the Iranian vessels could easily have been within only a few miles of the US ships when the rockets were fired.
Today’s much more extensive videos showed US military rockets being fired off the Pacific, Atlantic, and Gulf of Mexico coasts, from locations just outside US territorial waters to several hundred miles at sea. These videos made clear, as a Pentagon spokesman put it, “that none of our rockets came within even a thousand miles of any Iranian military vessel.”
White House spokesperson Jed Lee Earnest, asked the reason for the release of the new videos, said, “We thought it was important to show how restrained we have been. We would suggest that the Iranian government should show similar restraint, and not take actions that are an implied threat against our peaceful warships.”
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