Posted on 12/13/2011 5:34:03 PM PST by jazusamo
Iran has more to lose than America in current standoff
Iran is threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz. Go ahead, make our day. On Monday, Parviz Sarvari, a member of the Iranian parliament's national security committee, said, “Soon we will hold a military maneuver on how to close the Strait of Hormuz. If the world wants to make the region insecure, we will make the world insecure.” Closing the strategically important strait has long been viewed as one of Iran’s trump cards in the give-and-take with the United States and the West.
The impact of a strait crisis is overrated. About 17 percent of the world’s imported oil, or a third of oil transported by sea, goes through the strait. This is significantly less than the percentages from decades past when the Persian Gulf region was the global center of oil exports. Whether the temporary halt of that much oil would have a serious impact is questionable. Past regional crises have not lived up to their billing. There were warnings before Operation Desert Storm that the war would create an oil shock of incalculable consequences. Speculators drove prices up before the conflict in 1990, but in 1991, oil prices declined, even with Kuwait’s oil fields in flames. Similar warnings were heard regarding the disruptions that attended Operation Iraqi Freedom, but there were no gas lines, no chronic oil shortages.
Iran would suffer more than the United States from closing the strait. Iran’s economy is highly dependent on oil exports; closing the strait would cut off most of that trade.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Bring on cold-fusion! Who needs oil.
I guess maybe four hours would be needed to sink their entire navy. Maybe five.
As zer0 works hard to reverse this trend with moves like effectively killing Keystone, placing roadblocks to oil drilling in the gulf, Alaska.
I’d say your right on the money and the Straight would be off limits to their allies as of then.
Let’s see...How did that Suez crisis turn out. I was in third grade. I remember concluding at that young age that these arab folks were nuts. Haven’t change my mind.
Our bombing of their only refinery that produces gasoline might cear up the the strait.
Well said. In my lifetime we’ve not had another president work so hard against the USA, even Carter wasn’t close.
Since the Chinese are major customers and about 1/3 of their total supply goes through the Strait of Hormuz, they’ve got to be plenty pleased with their supplier. /s
Customer service? What’s that?
“What happens if the United States decides to ban Iranian ships from the strait? If the U.S. Navy closes the Hormuz, it will stay that way.”
Best statement in the article
Hey, another informed Obamamite.
All they have to do is sink a ship or two and the strait is closed..
The straits can be closed by land based artillery and missile batteries. The status of Iran’s navy is of little importance then.
They don’t even have to do anything. Just move units into position and announce on maritime channels that the straits are closed. No tanker captain is going to even try it.
Cruise missiles solve this problem or am I overly optimistic?
Potentially less useful than the scud hunt in western Iraq during the Gulf War. Which is to say that other than for diplomatic reasons, useless.
The missile units could easily be hidden in buildings in a twenty mile or more radius deploy, fire and be hidden again in less than ten minutes. A tanker could be laser targeted from the shore, eliminating even much of a radar signal to eliminate.
Then again, maybe the Iranians don’t move anything close. Just daring the tankers would be enough. Why risk assets that could be used against an American carrier fleet in that big bathtub called the Persian Gulf.
Given modern missile technology the US navy is nothing more than a giant floating target. Iranian and military sources note that the linkage Sorouri made between the capture of the RQ-170 and the naval drill in the Strait of Hormuz was intended to inform Washington that Tehran in possession of the drone no longer fears the ability of the naval air carriers the US has deployed in the Persian Gulf to prevent its closure of the strategic waterway.
Not new: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/washington/12navy.html
There is a reason American military officers express grim concern over the tactics used by Iranian sailors last weekend: a classified, $250 million war game in which small, agile speedboats swarmed a naval convoy to inflict devastating damage on more powerful warships.
In the days since the encounter with five Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz, American officers have acknowledged that they have been studying anew the lessons from a startling simulation conducted in August 2002. In that war game, the Blue Team navy, representing the United States, lost 16 major warships — an aircraft carrier, cruisers and amphibious vessels — when they were sunk to the bottom of the Persian Gulf in an attack that included swarming tactics by enemy speedboats.
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