It is refreshing to sit down to write a column presuming to give advice respectfully to the commander-in-chief of Allied forces in the current Iran war and to learn while writing the advice that President Trump has already taken the action advised. It seemed to me imperative that the United States deprive Iran of the pretense that it controls the Strait of Hormuz.
As far as I can discern, not a single mine has been found in the Strait — despite the Iranians’ apparent attempt to attach mines to dolphins and send them out in the hope that they will be suicide dolphins and bump into disobedient tankers or American warships. Dolphins are notoriously intelligent and seem not to have been tempted by this mission.
It is entirely possible that this threat, like all of Iran’s bloodcurdling claims of imminent terrible vengeance, is just hot air from a balloon that is now in tatters. Mr. Trump is absolutely correct to threaten to tax those oil shipping lines that pay fees to Iran to allow them to navigate the Strait; Iran cannot be permitted to extract blackmail from anyone.
As was outlined in this space last week, it is a relatively simple matter of putting adequate mine-sweeping ships and helicopters in front of convoys of 30 tankers or so, three times a day, with an escort of destroyers and complete control of the air space and Marines on each tanker as a final defense force against any Iranian impertinences.
This would put an end to the fiction that Iran can control that strait. It would also constrain somewhat the Comical Ali and Baghdad Bob fatuities of Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, Danang Dick Blumenthal, Adam Schiff, and other foaming-at-the-mouth Democratic tribunes of defeatism and cheerleaders for the ayatollahs.
For America, every domestic and international consideration militates for the swiftest possible victorious conclusion of this war. It is obvious to everyone with the slightest knowledge of the relevant facts that Iran cannot go on longer than about a month with the current level of a 70 percent reduction of its oil export revenues, which can relatively easily be increased to 90 percent.
One of the surviving Iranian leaders was reduced last week to pointing out the extent of Iran’s borders with its neighbors and the possibilities of overland export and import. Iran’s borders are with Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and only Pakistan offers any prospect of significant traffic, but it would be a trickle of oil and could easily be interdicted. The idea of substantially offsetting by overland methods the blockade of Iran’s ports and airspace is a ludicrous mirage.
Only ignorance and hatred of Trump can disguise the impotence of the Islamic Republic as money evaporates, the local currency (rial) dropped to two million to the dollar, and different spokesmen every few days keep making absurd peace proposals to the United States. A substantial resumption of the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, coupled with a likely oil production increase by the United Arab Emirates, which has wisely departed OPEC, and increased oil shipments from Venezuela as the United States repairs its industry, will stabilize fuel prices in the West within a few weeks. The United States has no concern for an early restoration of the half of Communist China’s oil supplies that has come from Iran. Presumably, Russia will attempt to help China, especially as Europe rolls back its consumption of Russian oil and gas.
The thugs of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seem to be able to prevent large hostile demonstrations but the regime demonstrated in January that it had to import terror squads from Iraq to fire live ammunition at Iranian civilians. It should be possible for the United States to interdict any return from these murderous Iraqi mercenaries and while the government of Iraq exercises little more authority over its ostensible territory than the government of Lebanon does in that country, the Iraqi Kurds and Sunnis and doubtless many of the Shiites as well, and the apparently respectable incoming government in Baghdad, have little enthusiasm for assisting the Tehran despotism in its death-throes.
It would be perfectly appropriate for the United States to resume hostilities directly against Iran if the Iranians attempted to attack the American escorted convoys taking oil through the Strait. The war will only end satisfactorily with the formation of a government in Tehran that believably renounces nuclear weapons, sponsorship of terrorism, interference in international waterways, and the extreme barbarism of the Islamic Republic’s suppression of dissent. It is impossible for outsiders and probably even for the best informed American and Israeli specialists to judge when elements in Iran prepared to accept those peace terms and abide by them could achieve the numbers and strategic influence adequate to take over the regime. But it will be soon.
First published in the New York Sun
https://www.newenglishreview.org/why-its-imperative-to-deprive-iran-of-the-pretense-it-controls-the-strait-of-hormuz/