US should apologize for trespassing Iran's waters: Commentator

Press TV has conducted an interview with Kaveh Afrasiabi, a political commentator from Boston, to discuss the apprehension of two US Navy boats by forces from Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Navy near the Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf on Tuesday, after they entered Iran's territorial waters.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.  

Press TV: The way many are looking at it, it does not seem like it was just an innocent incursion, a mistake or a miscalculation. Do you see it that way too?

Afrasiabi: Certainly the timing of it raises some questions since hours before President Obama’s State of the Union address we find two US military vessels inside Iran’s territorial waters and from Iran’s vantage point of course this is a disconcerting development and needs to be investigated thoroughly if indeed the US sailors ventured into Iran’s waters accidentally and by mistake then the US government needs to apologize to Iran and assure the Iranian government that it will take all the measures necessary in order to avoid the recurrence of such interventions in Iran’s territorial waters. Given the fact that this has happened near Farsi Island which is of high military value for Iran and there are unconfirmed reports that these two US vessels were snooping [on] Iran and there are a lot of questions as to whether or not they were basically spying on Iran’s naval facilities or not.

So, hopefully this is a passing development and we will not have to dwell upon it too long given the fact that the nuclear implementation is only a few days away and we should turn into an unwanted mini- crisis that would add another major concern about the nuclear deal and so forth because the region is already very volatile.

Press TV: Looking at the implementation of the nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1, do you think that tensions will further be exacerbated specifically when you look at the main stream media over here, they are calling it a potential crisis in the making?

Afrasiabi: The right wing US media and the neocons in particular would love to see a flashpoint between Iran and the US. Many of these people have already sided with Saudi Arabia in the latest rift between Tehran and Riyadh and hopefully as I said this would not be a mini-crisis and would be resolved quickly. Of course, much depends on investigation of this matter by the Iranian authorities and hopefully what the US has offered as the official explanation will be verified. Otherwise, it has the potential to basically linger on and so on and from Iran’s point of view this might raise questions about US’s intentions as why at this particular time this has happened and what is the US’s military intention in Iran’s territorial waters and there would be people in Iran and elsewhere that might say that this was a deliberate provocation and again I sincerely hope that this is not the case.      

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