A naval confrontation between the U.S. and Iran in the Gulf’s strategic waters provided a golden opportunity for Washington to step up rhetoric against the Islamic Republic and rally support for a military strike against what Bush calls the Iranian nuclear "threat."

"This was a serious incident," Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman said Monday. "We haven't had an event of this serious a nature anytime recently."

According to Mr Whitman, three U.S. Navy ships – a destroyer, a frigate, and a cruiser – were on what appeared to be a routine patrol in the Strait of Hormuz when five small boats "assessed to be Iranian" approached them early Sunday morning local time.

On Tuesday, the Pentagon released grainy footage, purportedly showing the small boats, which U.S. officials said were probably affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, speeding near the American warships.

The four-minute video, which supposedly condenses what U.S. officials have described as a 20-minute stand-off, is said to be shot from the bridge of the USS Hopper in the Strait of Hormuz, a strategically critical waterway through which as much as 40 percent of the world's oil exports are shipped.

In the U.S. recording, a Navy crewman can be heard over the radio warning the approaching vessels. “Request you establish communications, identify yourself and state your intentions, over," he says, referring to "five unidentified small surface" boats.

The U.S. then issues a final warning that if the boats do not change course immediately they will be "subject to defensive measures".

According to the CNN, an individual on one of the Iranian ships radioed “I am coming at you; you will explode".

Pentagon officials said the American warships began evasive maneuvers and were prepared "to take appropriate action" on the five boats before they turned away.

As expected, President Bush seized the weekend incident to renew his verbal assault on Iran.

"I am there to reassure and to look people in the eye and say, I believe Iran is a threat; we have a strategy to deal with it; and we want to work with you," Bush told the Arabic television station Al-Arabiya. "I believe we can solve this diplomatically.. On the other hand ... all options must be on the table in order to make sure diplomacy is effective."

Fabricated

On the other hand, the Iranian government said that the U.S. navy fabricated the video. "The footage released by the U.S. Navy are file pictures and the audio has been fabricated," Iranian state-run TV quoted a Revolutionary Guards source as saying.

Iran’s Parliament Speaker Gholam Ali Haddad Adel dismissed the whole incident as part of the U.S. "psychological and propaganda campaign” against Tehran.

"We have always shown that we believe in peace and avoiding tension, and we presume that the U.S. media propaganda is part of its psychological and propaganda campaign, which it is continuously conducting against Iran," Adel told Tehran Times on Tuesday.

"If one side should charge others of meddling in this region, that side would be Iran, because, unlike the Americans, who came from thousands of kilometers away and stationed their navy ships in the Gulf, we are a natural neighbor of this waterway," he added.

Bush’s visit

Whether fabricated or not, the incident is expected to heighten tensions between the U.S. and Iran. It also raises speculations that Bush’s visit to the Middle East, which began Wednesday, is aimed at shoring up U.S. allies in the face of Tehran.

According to AFP, U.S. ally Kuwait expressed anxiety about Bush's stated aim of building on the momentum of the Annapolis peace conference. "Kuwaitis are worried that Bush's visit could be to apply pressure on Kuwait and the region to win their support for a military strike against Iran," health ministry employee Sami al-Mani said.

Meanwhile, analysts say the naval stand-off drew worldwide attention because it took place in the most strategically important waterway in the world.

Washington and its allies have long been concerned that Iran could block the Strait of Hormuz, crippling U.S. oil shipments out of the Gulf, according to Anthony Cordesman, a security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"While the threat from Iran's conventional military may be real, the more dangerous threat is that of extremist groups' asymmetric attacks on oil facilities," he wrote in a 2006 report. "There is no attack-proof security system. It may take only one asymmetric or conventional attack on ... tankers in the Strait of Hormuz to throw the market into a spiral."

Source: Aljazeera.com