Five days after Sunday's encounter between US warships and Iranian boats in the Strait of Hormuz, details of what took place remain in dispute. What is clear, however, is that the US administration, at the very least, deliberately inflated the incident on the eve of President Bush's visit to the Middle East to menace Iran and raise the political temperature in the volatile region. ...

Over the past five days, holes have begun to appear in the initial Pentagon story. The US navy released a video of the Iranian speedboats spliced together with audio from the bridge of one of the ships. No mention was made of the white boxes and the key word "few" in the radio threat was indecipherable. The video, which has been widely broadcast, runs for only 4 minutes and 20 seconds and was thus an edited version of the 20-minute incident using audio from just one warship.

Commander Lydia Robertson, spokeswoman for the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, acknowledged yesterday that the navy could not be certain the radio message even came from one of the five Iranian boats. It may have come from another ship in the area or from shore, she said, adding: "We don't have a direct connection, but it's not necessarily a disconnect." Another aspect of the "threat" is also odd--there is no background noise as one would expect in a broadcast from a small high-speed boat. ...

For the Bush administration, the incident in the Strait of Hormuz could not have been better timed to stymie the development of diplomatic relations with Iran, to heighten tensions in the region and possibly to justify a further US military buildup against Tehran. It cannot be ruled out that the US, which has a long history of engineering provocations, concocted this latest naval encounter to meet these political purposes.