Iran’s Ace Weapon: Why the US Won’t Gamble on an Iranian War
Blockade of the Strait of Hormuz
by Finian Cunningham, 22 April 2010
Given the crescendo of veiled and increasingly unveiled military threats by the US and Israel against Iran, one has to admire the Iranians for their coolness under extreme pressure. The latest despicable – and in some legal opinion, criminal – threat by the White House that it would use atomic weapons against nuclear-unarmed Iran in the event of a conflict has been dismissed by the authorities in Tehran, who say they remain determined to pursue their civilian nuclear energy programme.
Far from being cowered, Iran has just launched three days of military war games in the Persian Gulf. The Islamic Republic carries out such manoeuvres every summer, but this year it has brought the exercises forward. No official explanation has been given, but it clearly is meant to be a signal to the US and its coterie of western allies that Iran will not be brow beaten by threats of economic sanctions and military strikes, including the threat of unleashing the most terrifying of weapons.
In this game of high-stakes poker, how is it that Iran can stay so composed? It is because Iran holds the ultimate weapon, not a weapon of mass destruction that the US claims it is seeking, but a weapon of mass disruption firmly within its grasp and ready to trigger immediately – the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
This is the narrow stretch of sea between Iran and the United Arab Emirates and Oman to its south that connects the Persian Gulf to open international waters. Some 40 per cent of global ship-borne crude oil passes through this channel every day. According to the US-based Energy Information Administration, an average of 15 tankers carry 16-17 million tonnes of crude oil through the Strait daily. Oil producers in the Gulf, including the world’s top supplier, Saudi Arabia, are totally dependent on this passage for their oil exports, which account for 80-90 per cent these countries’ total revenues. This is the world’s most sensitive choke-point for oil trade.
Iran has previously said that if it is attacked by the US or its allies it will blockade the Strait, and no doubt the current war games in the Gulf are aimed at underlining this warning. But it is only recently that Iran has acquired the maritime capability to deliver on its counter-threat. For example, during the 1980-88 war with Iraq when Iran was being bombed with chemical weapons by US client Saddam Hussein, Tehran did not have the capability to shut off the Strait. Nor in 1988 when the US shot down an Iranian civilian airline, killing 290 people onboard.
But over the last few years, Iran has invested heavily in building up a fleet of high-speed military boats equipped with anti-ship missiles and sonar-evading torpedoes. And it can be safely assumed that the Iranians have perfected maneouvres to ensure the rapid and complete shut-down of all shipping out of the Gulf. This task is made all the more feasible by the natural geography of the Strait. The Persian Gulf is a shallow sea so any ships that are sunk would represent hazardous obstacles that could not be easily removed. Also, although the Strait is some 20 miles across, the shipping traffic lanes are only six miles wide: two miles for incoming tankers, two for outgoing and two miles for a separation margin between both.
Under international maritime law, Iran (along with Oman) has sovereign territorial rights over these waters. Iran has under United Nations law agreed to grant "innocent passage" to ships through its waters provided there is no infringement of its security. Therefore, as energy analyst Ali Mallakin points out, Iran has the legal right to withhold passage if "its sovereignty is not respected" such as if the US were to launch a unilateral military strike against the country.
By that stage, of course, the argument will be merely academic. For the US will have launched yet another criminal war and the world economy will be plunged into darkness. Given the fragile state of the international economy, shutting off the Strait of Hormuz will explode the price of oil and with that any vain hope of economic recovery. Sitting under a multi-trillion-dollar mountain of debt, the US has furthest to crash and the social implications for this crumbling empire – already seething from widespread misery – cannot be overstated. The consequences for the US will quite possibly be more powerful than those from any weapon of mass destruction.
Both Iran and the US know this. Despite the chips that Washington is piling on to the poker table, both players know that it is Tehran that holds the high ace. That’s why the US will not dare gamble a war on Iran. And it will keep its Israeli attack dog muzzled.
Comments
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War, violence, and more killing
23.04.2010 14:10
Both as bad as each other!
I have family back in Iran and the conditions are terrible, the state enforces poverty and violence against sections of society it doesn't like especially any student radicals, Sunni's, women or atheists who dare to speak up.
Support freedom, support Iran's people! Don't be lured into supporting chauvinistic despots just because you hate the US. The enemy of your enemy is most certainly not your friend.
Anarcho Feminist
Enough is enough!
23.04.2010 14:47
It is high time that we in the West grew up and examined the reality of this propaganda: the anguished moralising over trivia, the simplistic reduction of the world to good guys and bad guys - usually blacks or foreigners, the endless repetition of an Americanised version of history with the complete absence of any truth about ongoing violations of international law by the US and its interventions from Vietnam to Chile by a country that has been almost continually at war for over 100 years, all of this adulterated with a mind-numbing dose of mentally stultifying childishness from I Love Lucy to Friends and Days of Our Lives.
The consequence of this is a war OF terrorism masquerading as a "war on terror" that has given rise to the daily murder of innocent civilians (ordinary people living ordinary lives just like you and me) by people armed with barbaric weapons and indoctrinated with a psychopathic, racist, computer-game mentality that trivialises the value of human life and dehumanises the "enemy" - entirely supported by a deluded masses obsessed with consumerism and an illusion of security offered by "the world police".
The repeating pattern that he refers to of lies and propaganda in preparation for a resource war from Afghanistan to Iraq and now to Iran is one that we cannot deny and should be ashamed to think that our governments think us so collectively stupid that it could be repeated.
Allen L. Jasson
e-mail:
allen.jasson@rightofchoice.com
The Uniform Commercial Code
23.04.2010 19:22
The UCC is the most harsh law there is. These are firm Contracts, with terms and conditions. If broken, they can be remedied in the International Bank of Settlements, wherein the US could be liable for paying all the loss of commerce through the Strait of Hormuz. ALWAYS follow the money.
aristocutionor
Iran, US = ?????
23.04.2010 20:03
The fact of it is that it isn't really possible to oppose the violence of one state without being thrust, by association, into supporting the violence of the other state. Therefore, anti-America equals pro-Iran and anti-Iran equals pro-America. Getting involved in opposing either side is immediately seized upon by the other side as somehow an assumed statement of support.
The fact of it is that both the US and Iranian states are violent, bloody incarnations of a single relationship which is false, violent and too easily hijacked by those with hidden political agenda's.
Here at IM we should be free to proscribe both entities for what they are...abusive belligerents locked in an endless war of words with each other using the phony language of war.
Iran is a violent state with a proven track record of severe human rights abuses. The United States is a violent state with a proven track record of severe human rights abuses.
This article dances around the notion that Iran has somehow got the strategic drop on the United States but that is not its real intention, its real intention is to suggest that IM somehow tacitly supports the Iranian state...and therefore supports the state of the United States!
We should be free to 'independently' condemn both.
Sue Lawley
Schoolyard bullies! That’s what the US has become
24.04.2010 00:44
Wow! How much dumber can the American people become.
anti-imperialist