by PAUL IDDON

During the late 1980s, American and Iranian naval forces repeatedly skirmished in the Persian Gulf. Media coverage speculated that the fighting could escalate into a full-fledged conflict between the U.S. and Iran.

“No, we’re not going to have a war with Iran,” Pres. Ronald Reagan bellowed to reporters. “They’re not that stupid!”

The U.S. destroyed an Iranian frigate and crippled another one during the largest of such clashes in 1988, but it didn’t escalate into a wider war. The skirmishes were a side-effect of the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War — and the so-called “tanker war” when both Baghdad and Tehran attacked shipping in the Persian Gulf.

Those tense days might have been the closest Washington and Tehran ever came to crossing the Rubicon. But nearly a decade later, the Clinton administration came close — perhaps even closer.

On June 25, 1996, a truck bomb ripped through the Khobar Towers complex in eastern Saudi Arabia — killing 19 American airmen. U.S. intelligence agencies blamed Iranian proxy forces for the bombing.

The death of Americans at the Khobar Towers brought back memories of another horrible attack. In 1983, Hezbollah blew up a much larger truck bomb outside the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut back, killing more than 240 American troops in an attack that journalist Robin Wright called “the largest loss of American military life in a single incident since Iwo Jima.”

At the Khobar Towers, a guard prevented the truck from directly entering the compound. Had he failed, many of the 372 others injured in the blast may well have died, too.

The Saudis reportedly had evidence showing that Iran was complicit, but refused to hand it over to the Americans out of fear of escalating the situation.

Clinton made it clear that if Iran was complicit in the attack — as the FBI and the broader intelligence community believed — he wanted a serious military response. He even informed Richard Clarke, his counter-terrorism adviser, that he did not “want any pissant half-measures.”

The Pentagon drew up military plans which ranged from launching cruise missiles at Iranian targets to undertaking a full-blown ground invasion of Iran. It appeared, however, that the agreed plan of action was to heavily bombard Iranian military targets in its Gulf provinces with air, missile and naval attacks.

However, that plan never came into fruition, owing to the circumstantial nature of the evidence and the fact the Gulf states were wary about the potential consequences.