Persian Gulf primed to explode

by Dr. Kaveh L Afrasiabi

The Persian Gulf powder keg may soon explode if the current cycle of mounting tensions continues unabated. Two days ago, a minor incident involving a US refueling warship and an Indian fishing boat off the coast of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) resulted in one fatality and three wounded. That the fishermen insist they were fired on without a warning – contrary to the US navy’s assertion – gives us a prelude to more ominous developments on the horizon. It seems trigger-happy American sailors see gathering clouds of conflict and are taking preemptive measures that, in this particular case, made a small dent in otherwise amicable US-India relations. In a sign of New Delhi’s unwillingness to call for an inquiry into the incident, however, it has not voiced even a whisper of criticism of the US. Initially, US media reported that the incident was a US warning to “Iran and al-Qaeda” to stay away from US warships, in light of Iran’s renewed threats to close the Strait of Hormuz. This reflects a US siege mentality that also underscores the Persian Gulf region’s growing volatility and potential for imminent maritime tensions.

This spike in tensions is also partly due to the US navy’s bulked up presence in the region. The Pentagon on July 16 deployed an extra aircraft carrier there months ahead of schedule. It is also organizing unprecedented mine-sweeping exercise in the area – this month it deployed four additional minesweepers and additional fighter jets to the region.

The resulting overcrowding of Persian Gulf waters with the US fleet is an invitation for similar incidents to this week’ fatal encounter. Accidental confrontations could easily escalate into something bigger in coming weeks and months, particularly if the US and Iran bump into each other.

There is no guarantee that a US-Iran war would not be triggered by such incidents, since there is no military-to-military hotline or similar communications to handle such emergencies. In spite of some US overtures toward such a preventive mechanism, Iran refuses to consider it, as well as any other “incident at sea” protocols, since it regards the US presence in the Persian Gulf as fundamentally illegitimate.

The thickening fog of suspicion and mutual distrust is growing more dangerous, with the US pondering the possibility of an Iranian provocation and Tehran studying the US’s inclination to resort to shows of force to assert its hegemony. Beyond such tactical questions, the larger strategic question is what is Washington’s ultimate aim?

From Tehran’s vantage point, it scored big points in recent drills that convinced the West of its vastly improved missile capability, contrary to various US expert studies that have painted a different picture, citing the Iranian missiles’ lack of precision and relatively low payload. Confronted by a more lethal adversary than previously thought, the US is now treading a fine line by relying on its military muscle to deter any Iranian “asymmetrical” provocation that could see oil prices soar. The US containment strategy may not work, however, if Tehran decides to up the ante against the US over the sanctions that are hurting the Iranian economy.

This is unlikely to happen, however, as major US exemptions for the Iran oil sanctions will, at least for the next five months, give the green light for business to continue mostly as usual with regards to Iran’s oil shipments. Should the US choose to remove those exemptions when they are up for review, Iran may opt for more direct action in the Persian Gulf.

In this rapidly evolving milieu, the Persian Gulf is hostage to the geostrategic calculations of, on the one hand, a Western superpower and its local client states and, on the other, a traditional regional power with growing military prowess. What makes the scenario more dangerous is that the whole picture is moving in the direction of a zero-sum game of strategy, that is, a win-lose scenario, increasingly bereft of prior shades of grey indicating “shared” or “parallel” interests. This sharpening of conflicting interests is ready-made fuel for open conflict in the Persian Gulf.

In the assortment of available remedies, one can easily point to the on-going multilateral nuclear talks between Iran and the “5 +1” nations (the United Nations Security Council permanent five members plus Germany) that have now been degraded to the level of experts. If the Western nations headed by the United States decide to continue with the uncompromising approach already seen at Iran Six meetings in Baghdad and Moscow, however, the nuclear standoff will linger and possibly worsen.

To de-escalate tensions with Iran, the West will need to take a vastly different negotiation strategy, one that is willing to trade sanctions for concessions. However, in a US election year, this is unlikely to happen.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran’s Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry, click here. He is author of Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing , October 23, 2008) and Looking for rights at Harvard. His latest book isUN Management Reform: Selected Articles and Interviews on United Nations CreateSpace (November 12, 2011).

On the Verge of An All Out War? Massive Military Build-Up in the Persian Gulf

by Ben Schreiner

The familiar menace of U.S. war drums have resumed at a fevered pitch, as Iran finds itself once again firmly within the Pentagon’s cross hairs. 

According to multiple reports, the U.S. is currently in the midst of a massive military build-up in the Persian Gulf on a scale not seen in the region since prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.  The military surge reportedly includes an influx of air and naval forces, ground troops, and even sea drones.  Lest one forgets, the U.S. already has two aircraft carriers and their accompanying striker groups in the region. 

A growing sense of Iran war fever can also be seen mounting in Washington.  For instance, in an effort to foil ongoing nuclear negotiations between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany), a bipartisan group of 44 U.S. Senators recently sent a letter to President Obama urging the administration to “focus on significantly increasing the pressure on the Iranian government through sanctions and making clear that a credible military option exists.”

Such hawkish posturing occurs despite the fact that the U.S. intelligence community (as well as the Israeli intelligence community, for that matter) finds no evidence that Iran has decided to pursue a nuclear weapon–the ostensible reason behind Western sanctions and threats of attack.  Moreover, as an April Pentagon report states, Iran’s military doctrine remains one of self-defense, committed to “slow an invasion” and “force a diplomatic solution to hostilities.”  (Compare this to the U.S. military doctrine rife with notions of global “power projection” and one sees where the credible threat lies.)  

The nuclear issue, though, is but a pretext used to veil U.S. imperial designs in the region.  As a senior U.S. Defense Department official recently let slip to the New York Times:  “This is not only about Iranian nuclear ambitions, but about Iran’s regional hegemonic ambitions.”  In other words, it is about removing one of the last irritants to U.S. power projection in the resource-rich Middle East.

Of course, Iran already finds itself under siege from a lethal trifecta comprised of U.S.-led cyber attacks, Israeli-led assassinations, and oppressive Western economic sanctions.  The latter of which has left ordinary Iranians to confront a toxic mix of ballooning inflation and rampant unemployment.  In short, as Conn Hallinan writes at CounterPunch, the West is “already at war with Iran.”

The question, then, is just how far this “war by other means” shall ultimately escalate?

Towards a Dangerous Escalation

Although punitive economic sanctions are frequently sold as an alternative to war, history is replete with evidence to the contrary.  In the end, sanctions are often but a prelude to military hostilities.  (One only needs to cross over to Iraq and look at the history of Western sanctions and eventual U.S. invasion.) 

In fact, a recent report in the New York Times warned of much the same.  The current round of Western economic penalties imposed on Iran, the paper wrote, “represent one of the boldest uses of oil sanctions as a tool of coercion since the United States cut off oil exports to Japan in 1940. That experiment did not end well: The Japanese decided to strike before they were weakened.”

But much like the attempted torpedoing of Japan’s economy prior to the Second World War, the current attempt to bring Iran to its knees via economic sanctions may very well be designed to draw an attack from Iran–thus creating a justification for a full-fledged U.S. military campaign to impose “regime change.” 

And much the same as in the 1940s, a global crisis of capitalism greases our current path to war.  After all, war enables the forcible opening of new markets, along with bounties galore to be wrought via “creative destruction”; both of which are desperately needed for the sustenance of an imperiled economic system predicated on limitless growth and expansion.  Indeed, this enduring allure of war has already reared its ugly head amidst the current crisis.

The colonial smash-and-grab that was the 2011 N.A.T.O. intervention into Libya, as Alexander Cockburn has deemed it, was our first evidence that Western elites have settled on war as a means to resolve the current intractable capitalist crisis.  But the spoils from Libya have proven to be insufficient to revive growth stymied since the onset of the 2008 financial crisis. 

A heavily sanctioned Iran, on the other hand, boasts a G.D.P. over five times larger than pre-“liberated” Libya, while also sitting atop the world’s third largest oil reserves and the second largest natural gas reserves.  A defeated and placated Iran able to be enveloped more fully into the U.S.-dominated capitalist system thus holds great potential for global capitalism’s needed regeneration.  Of course, in seizing control over Iran’s energy resources, the U.S. and its allies would also come to possess a monopoly over the Middle East’s energy resources–a strategic key in any future conflict with rivals Russia and China.

And so it is that under the imperative of renewing global capitalism that the U.S. swiftly amasses its military hardware to the Persian Gulf under to cloak of combating nuclear proliferation.  The accompanying talk of military hostilities and of using “all options” against Tehran by elites in Washington thus ought not to be taken as idle threats. 

Clearly, we stand at the very precipice of outright war.

New oil pipeline bypassing Strait of Hormuz opens as Iran continues to threaten blockade More at EndtheLie.com – http://EndtheLie.com/2012/07/15/new-oil-pipeline-bypassing-strait-of-hormuz-opens-as-iran-continues-to-threaten-blockade/#ixzz20kaLS0qz

By Madison Ruppert

Editor of End the Lie

(Image credit: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jonathan P. Idle)

Iran threatening to blockade the Strait of Hormuz over Western actions is nothing new, and of course the United States has been preparing for a potential battle there for quite a while. Personally, I have always believed that a dispute over the Strait could very well be the cause of a conflict with Iran.

However, now that states on the Persian Gulf have opened a large new pipeline which could significantly lower the current proportion of the world’s oil supply which passes through the Strait of Hormuz.

When considering the threats being made by the government of Iran, I think it is quite important to note that they make grandiose threats on a regular basis and that one should really not take these types of claims all too seriously.

While somewhere around 20% of the world’s oil currently passes through this relatively small strait, the minimum of 1.5 million barrels of crude oil per day which can pass through the pipeline will likely lower this number considerably.

The announcement was made by officials from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), since the pipeline begins in the western area of the Gulf nation.

This comes almost immediately after an Iranian naval chief claimed on Saturday that they could prevent even “a single drop of oil” from passing through the Strait of Hormuz if Iranian security is threatened.

Mohammed Saif al-Afkham, the director general of Fujairah municipality at the Indian Ocean end of the pipeline, announced that officials inaugurated the project on Sunday, while the UAE’s state-run International Petroleum Investment Company confirmed that the first shipment that passed through the pipeline was loaded onto a tanker according to the Associated Press and DPA.

It is hardly a secret that threats coming out of Tehran are not to be taken as realistic, as even the Associated Press notes, “the Iranian foreign ministry has so far played down the warnings and said that Tehran would not endanger global oil exports.”

It appears to me that individuals in the Iranian parliament and politics in general attempt to make themselves look like brave, courageous leaders by making clearly unrealistic threats and hard-line statements.

Yet when it comes to actually making the moves, I think the foreign ministry likely knows that they will never come to pass.

Consider that earlier this month, Iranian members of parliament were reportedly going to draft and pass a bill which calls “for a plan to block Hormuz Strait in reaction to oil sanctions.”

Unsurprisingly, the bill has not even been presented to legislators yet.

According to the UAE embassy in Washington, D.C., the pipeline actually began being filled with oil on June 30, adding in a statement that the project highlights the UAE’s “commitment to ensuring the reliable and safe delivery of crude oil … to global markets.”

The U.S. ambassador to the UAE, Ambassador Michael H. Corbin, attended the inauguration of the pipeline, calling it “a historic step in establishing multiple routes for the vital flow of oil from the Arabian Peninsula.”

The latest threat, from Iranian naval commander Ali Fadavi of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), also includes the claim that Iran will increase their military presence in international waters.

“If they (the U.S.) do not obey international laws and the IRGC’s warnings, it will have very bad consequences for them,” said Fadavi, according to the Iranian Fars News Agency.

“The IRGC’s naval forces have had the ability since the (Iran-Iraq) war to completely control the Strait of Hormuz and not allow even a single drop of oil to pass through,” claimed Fadavi.

“IRGC special naval forces are present on all of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s ships in the Indian Ocean and to its east and west, to prevent any movement,” he added.

It is hard to tell if these claims are at all accurate or even true. Unfortunately, now that there would be a way to continue to get oil to pass through the region even if the Iranians were to close the Strait of Hormuz, it seems as though the Western nations which have pressed Iran for so long have one less obstacle in their path.

U.S. moving submersibles to Persian Gulf to oppose Iran

latimes.com
July 12, 2012

The Navy is rushing dozens of unmanned underwater craft to the Persian Gulf to help detect and destroy mines in a major military buildup aimed at preventing Iran from closing the strategic Strait of Hormuz in the event of a crisis, U.S. officials said.

The tiny SeaFox submersibles each carry an underwater television camera, homing sonar and an explosive charge. The Navy bought them in May after an urgent request by Marine Gen. James Mattis, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East.

Each submersible is about 4 feet long and weighs less than 100 pounds. The craft are intended to boost U.S. military capabilities as negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program appear to have stalled. Three rounds of talks since April between Iran and the five countries in the United Nations Security Council plus Germany have made little progress.

Read more