In The Strait And Narrows
So the Iranians said that if there are attempts to stop it from exporting oil, they will block the Strait of Hormuz. The US Navy immediately jumped in saying, they wouldn’t allow it.
I wonder exactly how the Navy thinks they can stop the Iranians. If Iran dumps hundreds of the WWI and WWII type mines that they have into the narrow confines of the strait, the US Navy is SOL because they don’t have the equipment to deal with them. They can sweep up modern sophisticated anti-shipping mines like nobody’s business, but they had damage to the USS Princeton, a guided missile cruiser, from one of these ‘antiques’, and the guided missile frigate, USS Samuel B. Roberts, had its keel broken by another.
The Iranians also have anti-shipping missiles that are readily moveable and don’t need fixed sites.
The owners of the supertankers are not going to risk their vessels if Iran makes a real threat, and if one of them is sunk in the Strait, it is plugged.
The world can’t protect vessels from Somali pirates on the ocean, so what makes them think they can protect vessels in the narrow confines of the Strait of Hormuz from the weapons of Iran?
The US might consider waiting until there is actual, credible evidence that Iran is doing something, rather than the bogus garbage coming from MEK and the Israelis, before they set us on a path to a new war we can’t win, but which will destroy the world’s economy.
8 comments
I feel (and I’ve said it before) that the neocons really want and always have wanted war with Iran. They thought they could invade Iraq, pop Hussein out and pop Chalabi in and then they’d be sitting right in the neighborhood to attack Iran.
The neocons have poisoned the Republican debates with their insistence that we must save Israel (or where would the second coming and the Rapture take place?). Israel and the oil. But we were badly beaten in Iraq, caused a horrible mess of the country’s infrastructure and created one gazillion more Osama Bin Ladens while we were at it. We are doing the same thing in Afghanistan and Pakistan (and Yemen and Libya and…). Iran is the winner in this disaster.
Iran also is more educated, better informed, and armed. And BIGGER than Iraq. So who the hell thinks we can strut and threaten and Iran won’t take notice? How dumb do they think we are? … wait… don’t reply to that. I already know the answer.
I look at it as a military target, and it has more in common with Afghanistan that Iraq, i.e. a lot of mountains and caves to stash things and then bring them out. Unlike the Iraqis, the Iranians will go suicidal on you. They don’t have an interest in a new Persian empire, but they are more than willing to die defending their country.
Hey, it’s not their fault that the Shrubbery decided to eliminate the two biggest problems they had – Saddam and the Taliban, nor that the Hedgemony turned their back on Iranian offers of assistance in the Global War on Terror™. Their influence has risen because the US screwed up, not because of anything they did.
Iran is a signatory of and in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is more than Israel, Pakistan, or India can claim. They have uranium in their country, and the right to produce fuel for their power reactors. They have nuclear inspection teams in the country.
The absurd thing is that they haven’t been very successful in their efforts to produce the low levels of fuel for their reactors, suffering multiple problems with their enrichment facilities, so all of these people clamoring about them having a nuclear weapon ‘real soon’ is garbage.
The reality is that it is better for their economy if they export oil, rather than use it for domestic purposes, and they have a massive air quality problem from burning fossil fuels. Nuclear energy is a realistic solution to many of their problems, which is why they have been working on it since the Atoms for Peace program was initiated under Eisenhower. Most of the program was put in place by the Shah, and has been continued since the revolution, because the problems nuclear power is meant to address are getting worse, not better.
The best way of combating the power of Iran and Saudi Arabia is by switching to renewal fuels, and investing in alternative energy sources, so threats about whether a particular waterway is open don’t threaten the global economy.
Thank you! I totally agree with that last paragraph! I also agree with Elroon’s comment. The neocons have been trying to get at Iran for quite some time. They don’t care that everyone else has to suffer the consequences.
The really stupid thing is that it doesn’t matter who does the shooting, the US or Iran, any combat around the Strait will close it. If a ship sinks in the channel from any cause, not just war, the Strait is closed. Something should have been done long ago to widen and deepen the thing, but no one wants to pay for it.
Dump oil and other fossil fuels – that is the best solution.
During Israel’s recent kerfuffle in Lebanon, all it took was one Hizballah rocket landing in a schoolyard near Haifa to close Haifa port. Most insurance companies refuse to cover damage resulting from acts of war, and the moment Haifa was officially part of the war zone, every single captain inbound to Haifa turned his ship around and stayed well out at sea well away from Haifa.
Iran doesn’t even have to fire a single one of their aging Silkworm missiles to close the Straits. All they have to do is declare the portions of the Straits that pass through Iranian territory closed due to “military exercises” (note that about half the shipping channel is within Iran’s national borders, and because the channel sort of zig-zags, Iran closing their portion closes the whole thing) and threaten to torpedo any ship that attempts going through the Straits during their “exercise”, and every single merchant ship inbound to the Straits will turn around and head back for home. You simply don’t risk a $120M tanker that takes 2 years to build in a war zone. It isn’t done. No insurer on the planet would cover you if you did that.
Note that under international law there are no international waters in the Strait of Hormuz. You’re either in Oman or you’re in Iran. Period. And while there are generally recognized transit rights through the Strait, that happens mostly because it’s in Iran’s best interests for it to happen — after all, their oil has to go thru the Strait too (since their biggest oil fields are up by Iraq at the head of the Persian Gulf). Closing the Strait would thus devastate Iran’s economy, since even tankers bound for Iran’s ports would stay away. So there’s an element of bluffing here by Iran. But this is a bluff that shouldn’t be called, because the consequences if it *isn’t* a bluff is just a loss of a few poker chips — it’s a major disruption to the world economy.
– Badtux the Oil Penguin
The US is attempting to blockade Iran, and that is an act of war, even though they are doing it with ‘sanctions’, instead of battleships. Iran’s position is that if they are prevented from exporting oil. no one in the area will export oil. That is a reasonable attitude given the circumstances.
The US and Israel just don’t seem to understand that Iran doesn’t scare worth a damn. They don’t back down when threatened; they get mad.
You can’t claim that Israel has a right to close the coast of Gaza, but Iran can’t close its coastal waters.
If the US wants to take action against Iran, they need some hard proof that Iran is doing something wrong, not a lot of rumor and opinion.
The issue of transit rights through the Strait has been a beast since the days of the Shah. The United States has not signed on to the U.N. convention on transit rights through the Strait because this U.N. convention prohibits underwater transit (thus submarines would have to surface) and prohibits using transit rights to spy on or interfere with the territorial owners of the Strait (do you really believe U.S. warships transiting thru the Strait don’t have their eyes and ears wide open?!) and thus does not actually have any legal right to transit the Iranian part of the Strait, though turning the Strait into a war zone to stop U.S. warships from transiting it isn’t going to happen because that’d stop Iranian oil shipments lickity split. The funny part is that this UN convention is actually less stringent than what the Shah wanted — the Shah wanted Iran to be able to close the Strait at any time that its national interests called for doing so and wanted warships to be prohibited from transiting the Strait at all.
But basically, the reason the Strait is open today is because if it was closed, Iran couldn’t ship their oil. So you’re right, if Iran can’t ship their oil anyhow, what motivation does Iran have to keep the Strait open? None. Even senile old Ronnie Raygun realized that much, which is why he secretly supported *both* sides in the Iran-Iraq War…
AIPAC got the anti-Iran provision inserted into the damn NDAA, and there is going to be hell to pay with South Korean, Japan, etc. if the sanctions go forward. That’s the problem with global markets – everything is interconnected and consequences can’t be localized.
Since the Shah started the nuclear program, and the Shah negotiated the transit rights, the US needs to try the Shah – it’s as logical as anything else involving Iran and the Israelis.