Iran is threatening to blockade the strait if referred to the UN Sec council. Is this within their legal rights?
http://regimechangeiran.blogspot.com/2006/01/iran-may-seal-off-persian-gulf.html
Rights? No, but that’s always irrelevant in world affairs. What matters is whether they have the POWER to do it.
What I meant was is it considered an act of war?
IANAL, but a ‘blockade’ in and of itself would not be an “act of war”. The hostile actions taken to enforce the blockade could be considered an act of war.
Simplified example: If I don’t want you on my lawn yet found you there, I could tail you constantly and badger you to leave. The moment I took a swing at your noggin’ with a big stick–that’s where everything changes.
There’s nothing that I understand to say they can’t follow ships in and out of the Strait to ‘tail’ them. But it’d be different if they started firing shots across bows.
But astorian is right: do they have the military force to back up their claims? Are they willing to pay the military (and retaliatory) cost of throwing missiles at other nations’ ships?
Tripler
Didn’t we go through all this back in the 80s?
That’s kind of what I figured Tripler, thanks.
I’d love to see Ahmadinejad try that stunt. Such a move would be seen, rightly, as threatening not just by every developed nation dependent on OPEC, but also by every OPEC member on the Persian Gulf, including Iraq, the only other country besides Iran on the Gulf that is majority Shiite. For sure, such a move by Iran would intensify the age-old hatred and mistrust between the Sunni and Shiite Islamic worlds. Such belligerency might even help drive a much-needed wedge between Iran and Iraq’s Shiite majority. It’d also likely bring on a firestorm of criticism on Al-Jazeera, based in Qatar, which juts out in a very exposed manner into the Persian Gulf. (Although it’s the pointy bit of Oman which forms the tip of the Arabian peninsula which defines the elbow curve of the Strait itself.)
Who else is in that neighborhood? Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Oman, and Iran’s neighbor to the east, Pakistan (which is not on the Gulf but has nothing to gain from a resurgent Iran led by a fanatical Shiite madman). All majority (or, for all practical purposes, exclusively) Sunni; and those Gulf states are the backbone of OPEC. What would be the likely fallout of an Iranian move? A much closer level of cooperation and friendliness between the U.S. and those Persian Gulf states and Pakistan, with less resentment over our military presence and perhaps greater cooperation on the oil-production side.
In the longer run, should Iran go further off the deep end and promulgate any acts of terror (esp. against Sunni targets), that would allow the more Western-friendly and modern elements in Sunni governments to recast the war on terror as necessary to counter Shiite Persian aggression and Iran’s quest for nukes. The more nutty Iran acts, the more genuinely committed these states will be to the “War on Terror”.
:smack: (I left out the whole U.N. angle.)
Not to mention the intensifying affect this will have on global concerns concerning Ahmadinejad. We’re not going to be able to contain Iran from building nukes unless we have the full cooperation of the U.N., including Russia and China. Should the newly-“elected” president of Iran to order a blockade of the Strait, it’d be a diplomatic blunder of historic proportions, as it would provide the West with, probably, the final piece of evidence we need to push for a full slate of sanctions and condemnations in the U.N., as not even Russia and China could justify a veto to protect such a wildly unstable figure. More to the point, it would intensify the US-UK-France-Germany alliance to act independently of the U.N., if necessary, to impose our own sanctions. Since Iran is dependent on imported high-tech items from France and Germany in particular, even this program of limited sanctions may have a substantial effect to contain Iran’s progress on developing nukes, on Iran’s economy in general, and on Ahmadinejad’s political popularity at home.
What the world needs to see in Iran is regime chance, but that’s not likely to occur through military action by a foreign power (although a “decapitation” strike grows more likely every day); what we really need is for Iran’s moderates to become galvanized and act in concert, not just to undermine his grip on power, but to dismantle the bureaucratic-theological nexus that produced Ahmadinejad – in short, another, secularizing, Iranian Revolution.
It was my understanding that a blockade was in and of itself an act of war (although Wikpedia doesn’t seem to say one way or the other). This is why the United States called their blockade of Cuba a “quarantine” during the 1962 Missle Crisis, to leave themselves a little wiggle room.
In theory I suppose they have the right to control access within their 12 mile limit.
All the lessons in realpolitik are nice, but they don’t really answer the OP’s question. Does Iran have a good claim on the Strait as part of their territorial waters? Looking at a map it would look like they would have to share the narrowest part of the strait with Omen, but that doesn’t really answer wheather they Iran could deny shipping if they blocked access to their territory. They control several islands, and thus I’d imagine some distance out from them, if this territory crosses all the navigable shipping lanes, then I’d say that Iran would have the legal right to block the strait to foreign traffic.
It’s a matter of some dispute, as sea boundaries always are, but the navigable portions of the straight are generally considered to be in Oman’s territory.
According to Part II, section 2 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea shipping would have a right of passage through the straits even if it’s all someone’s territorial waters (i.e.: strait is territorial waters != right to restrict passage). Iran has signed but not ratified the treaty.