admiral? our commander at msnbc and chief national security and diplomacy analyst, you know those words very well from what you know and the britts were claiming they were in international waters. was iran looking for provocation here? >> absolutely, andrea. every one of those ship has a transponder on it. the position is not only to the people of the ship goes up to the satellite and shipping company knows where they are. there is no question in my mind that ship was conducting routine international passage. the problem was the british warship was too far away this time to actually intervene so they attempted simply using the radio to wave off the iranians. just to give your viewers a sense of scale here. the iranian gulf is a huge body of water. it is the size of california. think of trying to patrol california, the britts have five