In January, a senior admiral of the Iranian navy announced he was sending two warships "to the United States' maritime borders" in order to send "a message" to Washington.Adm. Afshin Rezayee Haddad was bluffing. Tehran did indeed dispatch a task force of two rather aged warships—only one of them meaningfully armed.
But the Iranian navy's 29th Flotilla never went anywhere near the U.S. It barely even left Iran's territorial waters. And instead of sending a message to Washington, the flotilla merely skirmished with African pirates before quietly returning home. The 29th Flotilla's rather pathetic deployment continues a long, less-than-proud tradition of Iranian naval posturing.