Last week in the Gulf of Oman an Israeli owned transport ship was attacked. The ship was said to be struck from something “above the water” implying that it wasn’t a mine.

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said on Saturday that his “initial assessment is that Iran” was behind Thursday’s attack on an Israeli-owned ship.

The British Maritime Trade Operations Authority and Dryad Global, a maritime security company, said that a ship was exposed to an explosion in the Gulf of Oman on Thursday.

Iran regularly harasses ships moving through the Strait of Homuz and surrounding waters. My last trip through the strait on a US naval warship was fairly exciting with Iranian aircraft buzzing low over us.

The contentious relationship between Iran, Israel and the West is not new. What is new is the administration of the US. While Iran frequently bothers adversarial shipping, they rarely end in explosions.

Iran may be testing the administration to see if it is truly Obama’s third term. If you remember, during Obama’s tenure, 10 US sailors were captured and held by Iran for a short time. It was very soon afterward that the sanctions against the regime were lifted. So Iran learned that the way to deal with him was with hostility.

It was also the same administration that refused to veto a measure at the UN that condemned Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank. This was a major break in the US, Israel relationship.

Iran has refused to back away from uranium enrichment until sanctions are completely lifted against them. This follows the US negotiating with South Korea to release 7 billion dollars of Iranian money held frozen.

Iran eventually got what they wanted by playing hardball against Obama, they are assuming the same will happen again.