I don’t know if that’s accurate or not. I’m pretty certain on the main CNN.com article that came out the day this whole story broke had a snippet in it regarding how in some respects Iran doing what they are threatening with the Straits would interfere with their ability to import refined fuel since they do not have the capacity to refine enough.
Some googling around is inconclusive, but yields up that Iran’s refining capacity has, in fact, increased by quite a bit within the last couple of years, which I did not know. Whether that meets demand or not, I do not know. I’m guessing not.
Well, there’s always the sneaky option of doing it via submarine, though I have no idea whether or not Iran has that kind of tech in storage. I know they have subs that is, and passable ones at that, but not if they have sub-launched mines.
That being said, on paper turning a standard torpedo into a homing mine doesn’t sound like rocket science.
I generally respect CNN and its news-gathering ability, but it would come as no shock if they simply used the research from a year or two ago.
They certainly imported a fair amount last year (maybe 20-40% of their demand) but not “most” as that CNN report indicated. Within a year or two, with additional refineries coming online, I’m not sure if they could simply get by, especially since some of their imported gasoline comes from Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, which do not require the sea route.
Martin is completely correct. The Military war in Afganistan and esp Iraq was over in a very short time. The expense wasn’t even that much. The real problem comes with attempting occupations and the resulting guerrilla war, something no military is very good at quashing, and face it, the USA is likely worse than some in this regard. It also gets very very expensive, and gets worse public opinion wise as the “war” grinds on day after day after day with no end in sight, billions of $ pouring down a infinite rathole, and bodies coming home all too often.
However, the US Navy can easily, with few casualties and not much expense, quash any Iranian naval forces, and keep their airplanes grounded.
I wonder if Google news is onto something, amid the Iran and the Straight of Hormuz news this was among the headlines:
:dubious:
Not a mention of Iran in the article, I mostly agree with the main idea of many posters that Iran is bluffing, but the cynical side of me tells me also that Iran and others were aware of the oil situation and they expect the sabre rattling to help prevent further drops in prices, at the same time I do wonder if there are efforts afoot from other powers to prevent Iran from using the oil card by announcing more supplies elsewhere.
Refining capacity of Iran is mostly a red herring though. It would be worse for them if they had none, since they’d be buying market-price refined petroleum products. But either way the sanctions would force them to sell at a discount off market price.
In some of the various articles mentioned/linked to in this thread I’ve seen it said that anywhere from 50-80% of Iran’s government budget is satisfied by sales of petroleum. And that the sanctions could cut from 20-40% of Iran’s revenue. That’s going to result in a very cash strapped government regardless of whether or not they can refine their own petroleum products.
Most of what I’ve read is that markets priced “generic political instability” into the price of oil months ago, and that Iran’s specific threats are just one in a long line of random threats Iran has made and never backed up–meaning the markets aren’t taking them seriously. Basically Iran has made so many different threats so many different times especially in the past 10 years, that the markets have decided they can’t really be concerned about those threats.
That’s not saying the markets are some sort of “proof” of how Iran will act. Iran is an independent actor from the markets, it just means the markets have grown unresponsive to Iranian threats and that they lack the sort of credibility people would need to make purchasing/selling decisions on.
I’ll also just quickly reiterate, that arguably Iran is the single country most dependent on a navigable Straits of Hormuz. This threat is akin to the United States threatening to mine the Port of South Louisiana along with a few other major American ports.
Well, yes, that would hurt all the countries in the world due to disrupting trade with the world’s largest economy. But it would hurt us worse than any other individual country.
Or, let’s put it this way. Let’s presume (and this is fanciful) we were in a “total war” with Iran, meaning a World War II style conflict where our national economy was transformed into a war economy and we were resolved to fighting to the bitter end, just as with WWII we basically are not concerned with economic well being of the United States or running up big debt, we’re just concerned with producing enough resources to throw at the Iranians and power our war machine.
In such a war, the United States would have very good reasons to close the Straits of Hormuz because of the strategic impact it would have on Iran.
I only point this out to basically demonstrate what might be obscured a bit, that the Straits really are more vital to Iran than they are to us. Further, several of the other Persian Gulf countries have a few alternative means of shipping oil and doing general trade (keep in mind no country just trades in oil, all the Persian Gulf nations import lots of different products and require those imports for their societal functioning.) Something like 80% of Iran’s exports leave through the Straits, but 99% of their imports come in through the Straits.
There are lots of nice thing Iranians use in their day to day life that are not made in Iran, and closing the Straits would mostly close off all trade in those goods. Iran would probably still be able to sell some oil overland and through other methods, but there is no easy way Iran is going to replace the source of 99% of its consumer import goods.
No…The Staits are more vital to the West than to Iran.
The west is totally addicted to oil. Iranian citizens are not addicted to consumer goods.
If Iran closes the straits for 3 weeks, it will have zero impact on the Iranian citizen’s lifestyle. They’ll be able to wait patiently for a few weeks before buying new shoes, or a DVD player.
But it will drive the western world’s economies to a dizzying state of panic. Wall Street can’t wait patiently–and may not even survive— 3 weeks with zero oil flowing.
It won’t be zero oil flowing not by a long shot. Very little oil that the USA uses flows thru the Straights, and of course there are other nations in Africa, North & South America, and other Middle east regions where a LOT of oil comes from. In fact, it won’t even be a shortage. Now sure, Wall Street does sometimes stampede for frivolous reasons, and it could happen for this, but as has been shown several times in this thread- the Straights do not control that much oil. Nor can the Iraqis actually shut down traffic on them.
It’s not just DVD players, but things like cigarettes, medicine, etc. I can bet you serious money that if Iranian cigarette prices triple that’s going to cause a serious problem.
FWIW, the projections I’m seeing on the results of the Straits Closing would be $150/barrel oil.
That’s high, but not “the end of the West in 3 weeks” high, not even close. Cite.
West Texas Intermediate (WTI) has been as high as $145 before, and Brent has been as high as $143. So we can make fairly realistic projections about what oil at such a price would mean and how it would affect the economy.
Considering the Western world didn’t implode at mid-140s oil I would be surprised if it was the end of civilization over $150/barrel oil.
Additionally, Iranians may not be as consumerist as Americans, but they aren’t all drooling lunatics who live in caves and scream about Allah all day. In fact Iran has a very cosmopolitan history and even the extremism of the past 30 years hasn’t totally stamped that out.
When it comes to things like electronics, Iranians are very digital and very active in technology. Iran has a lot of people that really like technological gadgets and even a lot of people trained in IT (many of whom historically used to defect to the West to work.) This isn’t a country that would be thrilled about not being able to buy stuff.
This isn’t North Korea where the people might have one VCR per 10,000 houses with smuggled in videos from the 1970s and where some of the people are eating grass. Iran may have a backwards government but its people aren’t stone age barbarians that are content to live life without the finer things.
I admit I am not well versed in this issue. Please be patient.
What’s wrong with the U.S. doing nothing and leaving it all up to other nations for just this once?
I say this because the one thing that REALLY concerns me is mission creep. For f*ck’s sake we are FINALLY extricating ourselves from the Iraq war and I have some slight hope we’ll be leaving Afghanistan sometime in the (hopefully) near future.
Do we have to jump right back into another conflict? Can’t someone else pick up the slack for a change if it’s all that important?
There’s also the fact that they experienced a minimal “arab spring” during their election process that was brutally subdued. I wonder how long their educated, worldly aware populace would put up with such a move by the government. AFAICT their government is already on shaky ground with the populace as it is.
I’ve heard second hand from Iranians living in the United States that there is a huge group of “The Great Unwashed”, perhaps equivalent to our rednecks who not in their best interests, vote Republican who support the religious government.
I don’t know anything specific about US Navy mineclearing ability; but it’s not exactly a super rare skillset. A lot of mineclearing has been done throughout the 20th century and it’s also something European navies would be helping us with, some of them specialize in that sort of thing is my understanding.
I hadn’t really heard that U.S. minesweeping capability “sucked” in the 1980s. I know we had a ship hit a mine, but the ship wasn’t a minesweepe but a destroyer that was not tasked to clear mines at all. It was unexpected that they encountered a minefield and I don’t believe they had any specialized mineclearing equipment, but I could be wrong. My understanding is someone on watch caught sight of a mine visually and sounded the alarm. Through careful maneuvering they were able to avoid the first mine and had almost completed the arduous process of essentially “backing up” in a naval vessel when they hit another mine. I could be wrong on that, but anyway, the Samuel Roberts wasn’t hit while trying to clear mines it was hit when it ran into a minefield it didn’t expect.
I would expect specifically tasked minesweeping ships to do a better job, if for no other reason than the fact that they are going to know there are mines out there and roughly where they are (in the Straits) versus the Samuel Roberts situation in which they didn’t know they were going to be going through a minefield (and they had actually crossed through that water a day or so before and it wasn’t mined then.)
I’m on vacation and my reference is my lunch reading at work (Lessons of Modern War Vol II: The Iran-Iraq War), and I’m not due back until Tuesday. It dealt rather nicely with the mine threat. IIRC, the US Navy lacked training, what few minesweeping vessels in inventory were WWII era, and not in the area. Europe had more modern ships and training, and were better able to respond to the mine threat.
Found some stories on the topic with a quick search.
