[QUOTE=Inbred Mm domesticus]
TonySinclair and XT: I didn’t think of warfare in the Strait of Hormuz because I do not take Iran’s military threats seriously. They do not seem capable of doing overt, offensive action against a strong military. I would include blocking the Strait of Hormuz as such an act. So I doubt they would even attempt it with any decent American naval presence in the region. If they did then yeah it would affect gas prices for as long as it was unresolved.
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Well, I don’t agree with you that they aren’t a serious threat to trade in the Straits, let alone couldn’t pose some kind of threat to US Naval forces operating in the region. I don’t think they are a huge existential threat, but they certainly have both mines and surface to surface missiles that are quite capable of hitting and damaging or sinking a ship…certainly an unarmed freighter or oil tanker.
Whether they WOULD do those things is certainly debatable, but they may feel like they have to do something, given their own rhetoric and the way public disquiet. They wouldn’t be the first country that got into a shooting war with a more powerful nation because they backed themselves into a corner at home and had no choice, from their perspective.
It could play out that way. Or it could play out that it helps Obama and hurts Romney. Or vice versa. Or the pain could fall on one party or the other. It’s impossible to predict exactly what the American people could or would do in such a situation, since we don’t know how the situation will play out. Even if we had all the details, the American people and their reaction to events like this aren’t exactly easy to predict.
Maybe so…maybe no.
Romney might do that (I think he would), or he might not depending on the circumstances that lead up to the conflict and the various reactions to it. Either way, I don’t think it’s possible to predict exactly what the American people would do in any of these situations, or what effect it would have on the election.
I think the biggest impact on the election would come not from gas prices or from the economy, but from Obama’s reaction to the situation. If people felt that the situation was out of control, and that Obama was unable to do anything about it, that would be a serious negative for him. But if he was able to intercede in an effective way, then it would be an enormous positive.
I would be very interested to see reliable data that supports that. My perception is that there is a considerable lag for prices to return to normal when a crisis is over, but that price increases are very responsive to world events.
I completely agree with that, as well as large corporations simply dragging their feet on hiring and expansion until after the election, but that could happen for any election. I guess a Middle Eastern conflict is a fairly constant danger as well, but given the leaders (Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad) and circumstances, it seems especially likely this year.
I think the Iranians are using this manufactured “crisis” to boost the price of their oil. They can make all the bellicose speeches they want, but they would never be so foolish as to provoke a war.
As for the other muslim countries: the sunnis of the Persian Gulf (Quatar, Bahrein, Kuwait), and the Saudis would be more than happy to see Iran cut down to size-sure, there would be the usual yammering in the UN (about “zionist imperialism”), but everybody would be secretly happy about an Iran beat-down. The only thing: this war has to be carefully run, so as to avoid the appearance of US-Israeli cooperation-it has to be an Israeli-only affair, and duly “protested” by the US and Europe. It also has to result in a pro-Western government emerging in Iran (that might be hard to pull off).
There’s an active thread right now, called “To all Obama apologists on the economy. You need to go fuck yourself today” which is based on the following facts:
I guess you don’t remember Bush’s speech about how, although war was the last thing he wanted, Hussein was forcing his hand by refusing to admit he had WMD’s.
I tend to agree that Iran would not be so foolish as to actually attack Israel directly, but provoking is in the eye of the provokee. Many people, in the US as well as Israel, think that Iran’s support of Hezbollah is more than sufficient provocation.