Free Republic

Despite its cool Green parties and ambitious wind and solar agendas, Europe remains by far the world’s largest importer of oil and natural gas. Oil output in the North Sea and off the coast of Norway is declining, and the European Union is quietly looking for fossil fuel energy anywhere it can find it. Europe itself is naturally rich in fossil fuels. It likely has more reserves of shale gas than the United States, currently the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas. Yet in most European countries, horizontal drilling and fracking to extract gas and oil are...

Iran is making good on its threats. Last Thursday’s bombing of two oil tankers in the Straits of Hormuz was just the latest in a string of attacks that have taken place in the maritime choke point in the past month. Thirty percent of global petroleum exports transit the Straits of Hormuz annually. On April 22, Alireza Tangsiri, the Commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval force, announced that if the U.S. went ahead with placing a full embargo on Iranian petroleum exports, Iran would close the Straits of Hormuz. “If we are prevented from using it, we will...

GENEVA, May 12 (Reuters) - A senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander said on Sunday the U.S. military presence in the Gulf used to be a serious threat but now represents a target, the Iranian Students' News Agency (ISNA) reported. The U.S. military has sent forces, including an aircraft carrier and B-52 bombers, to the Middle East in a move that U.S. officials said was made to counter "clear indications" of threats from Iran to American forces in the region. The USS Abraham Lincoln is replacing another carrier rotated out of the Gulf last month. "An aircraft carrier that has at...

Though Iran’s Great Prophet-9 military exercise ended last month, you can count on Tehran’s military to wring every last drop of bellicosity from the event—such as showing off an apparently armed drone taking a bead on a ship crossing the Strait of Hormuz. Iran conducted the exercise during the last week of February, and centered it around the theatrical, Michael Bay-esque destruction of a stationary wooden aircraft carrier prop floating off Iran’s Larak Island.

Never mind the negotiations with Iran over the Islamic Republic's nuclear weapons program. Far more urgent developments are afoot. While the foreign ministers were busily counting how many centrifuges could spin in Iranian facilities, President Obama and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have arranged a working relationship throughout the Middle East that effectively puts American policy at the service of Iran.Long the goal of Obama, who sent a private emissary to Tehran as early as the 2008 election campaign to tell the Khamenei regime he wanted to be their friend, there is now a de facto alliance between the two...

'Radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza can be extradited to the US after Europe's human rights judges rejected his request for an appeal, officials have said. Hamza wanted to fight a European Court of Human Rights ruling that extradition would not breach his human rights. But his request was rejected by a panel of judges, a spokesman for the court said. The unanimous judgment said there would be no human rights breach either as a result of likely detention in ADX Florence "supermax" prison in Colorado, or the length of possible sentences on conviction. The decision means Hamza, who was jailed...

Thousands of US troops began descending on Israel this week. Senior US military sources told debkafile Friday, Jan. 6 that many would be staying up to the end of the year as part of the US-IDF deployment in readiness for a military engagement with Iran and its possible escalation into a regional conflict. They will be joined by a US aircraft carrier. The warplanes on its decks will fly missions with Israeli Air Force jets. The 9,000 US servicemen gathering in Israel in the coming weeks are mostly airmen, missile interceptor teams, marines, seamen, technicians and intelligence officers. The incoming...

(Reuters) - Iran announced plans on Friday for new military exercises in the world's most important oil shipping lane, the latest in weeks of bellicose gestures towards the West as new sanctions threaten Tehran's oil exports. Real Admiral Ali Fadavi, naval commander of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, said exercises next month would focus directly on the Strait of Hormuz, which leads out of the Gulf and provides the outlet for most Mid-East oil.Iran held a 10-day drill which ended on Monday in neighboring seas."Today the Islamic Republic of Iran has full domination over the region and controls all movements within...

(Reuters) - Should Iran's rulers ever make good their threats to block the Straits of Hormuz, they could almost certainly achieve their aim within a matter of hours.But they could also find themselves sparking a punishing -- if perhaps short-lived -- regional conflict from which they could emerge the primary losers.In recent weeks, a growing number of senior Iranian military and civilian officials have warned that Tehran could use force to close the 54 km (25 mile) entrance to the Gulf if Western states impose sanctions that paralyze their oil exports.In 10 days of highly publicized military exercises, state television...

The pieces and policies for potential conflict in the Persian Gulf are seemingly drawing inexorably together. Since 24 December the Iranian Navy has been holding its ten-day Velayat 90 naval exercises, covering an area in the Arabian Sea stretching from east of the Strait of Hormuz entrance to the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Aden. The day the maneuvers opened Iranian Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari told a press conference that the exercises were intended to show "Iran's military prowess and defense capabilities in international waters, convey a message of peace and friendship to regional countries, and test...

Two days ago we reported on bombshell revelation of a cyber-attack plot against the U.S. formulated in Mexico with Iran government officials at the center.  The plot was exposed last week in a documentary on Univision, the largest Spanish language network in the U.S.   Today the Washington Times has additional information involving not only the Iranian Ambassador to Mexico, but also the Cuban Embassy, and the Venezuela consul in Miami.  The cyberplot was labeled "disturbing" by the State Department, and drew quick response on Capitol Hill, as well.  Senator Robert Menendez, (D-NJ), Chairman of the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere has already...

US Government Urges American Citizens to Leave Syria as US Aircraft Carrier Approaches As the violent crackdown against Syrian dissidents continues, the US government is warning all American citizens in the country to leave immediately, according to CBS. Turkish citizens are also being warned to stay out of the country. The US ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, was pulled from that country last month. The U.S. embassy continues to urge U.S. citizens in Syria to depart immediately while commercial transportation is available,” began a statement released Wednesday on the embassy website. “The number of airlines serving Syria has decreased significantly...

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) Iran announced Tuesday that it has put the elite Revolutionary Guards in charge of defending the country's territorial Persian Gulf waters in what appeared to be a hardening of its stance in the vital oil route. U.S. commanders in the Gulf have in the past said they find Guards ships more confrontational than the regular Iranian navy, which until the new order was responsible for Iranian defenses in the Gulf. Iran has warned repeatedly that it will close the narrow Hormuz Strait at the mouth of the Gulf if the United States or Israel attacks it amid...

Throughout the Cold War, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists kept a Doomsday Clock, monitoring how close they thought the world was to catastrophic nuclear destruction, measured as ‘minutes from midnight.' This week Iran tested its first nuclear-capable, long-range missile and moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock a little closer to disaster.

The Strait of Hormuz Incident and U.S. Strategy January 14, 2008 | 1955 GMT By George FriedmanIranian speedboats reportedly menaced U.S. warships in the Strait of Hormuz on Jan. 6. Since then, the United States has gone to great lengths to emphasize the threat posed by Iran to U.S. forces in the strait — and, by extension, to the transit of oil from the Persian Gulf region. The revelation of an Iranian threat in the Strait of Hormuz was very helpful to the United States, coming as it did just before U.S. President George W. Bush’s trip to the region....

Excerpt - ABOARD USS JOHN C. STENNIS, May 23 (Reuters) - Nine U.S. military ships entered the Gulf on Wednesday for a rare daylight assembly off Iran's coast in what naval officials said was the largest such move since the 2003 Iraq war. U.S. Navy officials said Iran had not been notified of plans to sail the vessels, which include two aircraft carriers, through the Straits of Hormuz, a narrow channel in international waters off Iran's coast and a major artery for global oil shipments. Most U.S. ships pass through the straits at night so as not to attract attention,...

March 7, 2007 — A former U.S. Navy sailor has been charged with allegedly passing military secrets about U.S. Navy movements through waters in the Middle East to al Qaeda-related Web sites during the spring of 2001, just months after the USS Cole was attacked in Yemen. Hassan Abujihaad, formerly known as Paul R. Hall, allegedly passed information about U.S. Navy warship movements in the Straits of Hormuz in April 2001 while he was a member of the Navy. The information passed along contained details about vulnerabilites of U.S. vessels — including susceptibility to small boat attacks by terrorists. Abujihaad...

See for example this thread first. Iran says the Straits of Hormuz will be closed in a war (they will lose). If they threaten our oil let's defile their soil sayin' "Hormel or Hormuz? You can choose!"