Iran couldn't possibly be practicing attacks on U.S. aircraft carriers, could they? Nah.

About a week ago, the idiots at The Hill -- a government-funded propaganda organ for the Democrat party (supposedly nonpartisan but, seriously, read it sometime) couldn't imagine why Iran would be building a 3/4-size replica of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. It apparently is not intended to be a functional carrier, but merely a reasonable, sea-going-ish (it floats) facsimile of a Nimitz-class carrier. Maybe without engines. Why build such a thing?

“We’re not sure what Iran hopes to gain by building this. If it is a big propaganda piece, to what end?” said Cmdr. Jason Salata, a spokesman for the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which operates out of Bahrain.
One potential reason that Tehran might want to blow up an American carrier would be if the nuclear talks fall apart between Iran and the P5+1 group: the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Russia and China.

It is not surprising a Navy spokesman wouldn't tell a media outlet -- in this case, not The Hill but the New York Times, whom The Hill was quoting -- what the Navy really thought. Instead, they fed the NYT the maybe-they-want-to-blow-it-up-for-propaganda horseshit quoted by The Hill:

WASHINGTON — Iran is building a nonworking mock-up of an American nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that United States officials say may be intended to be blown up for propaganda value.

What could possibly be misleading about that? Hmmmmmmm. Why might Iran build a mock-up of a U.S. aircraft carrier? Gee, it's almost like the way U.S. Special Forces build mock-ups of villages and buildings where we are planning to conduct raids so that they can practice under realistic circumstances. Nah, that couldn't be it, Iran says:

According to Iranian newspapers quoted by Reuters, the mock ship was in fact “part of the decor” of a movie being made by director Nader Talebzadeh on the 1988 shooting down of an Iran Air civilian plane by the USS Vincennes. All 290 passengers and crew on board the plane were killed in the disaster, which the US called an “accident.”

Hard to understand why a movie about that incident would involve building a mock-up of an aircraft carrier when the U.S. ship that shot down the airliner was an Aegis cruiser, and no aircraft carrier was involved. Oddly enough, this Aegis cruiser:

does not look like this Nimitz-class aircraft carrier:

So why is it so difficult to figure out why the Iranians are building a mock Nimitz and not a mock Vincennes, the ship involved in the shoot-down that supposedly is the subject of the movie? Oddly enough, somebody finally found an analyst who would tell the truth: that Iran clearly is planning to practice techniques to take down a U.S. carrier:

It is far more likely that the Iranians are building a replica of a U.S. aircraft carrier to practice their swarm techniques, [Christopher] Harmer [of the Institute for the Study of War] said. After losing battles with the U.S. Navy in the 1980s, the Iranians realized that they could not defeat the U.S. Navy in a conventional fight, so they have adopted Kamikaze tactics in which hundreds or thousands of small boats armed with rocket launchers or machine guns would launch suicide attacks against U.S. warships.

Hey, ya think? I mean, just because we build mock-ups to practice attacks doesn't mean other countries might do the same thing, right? Yeah, that's what I thought, too.