Noise Level Rises Over Iran Threat to Close Strait of Hormuz
By RICK GLADSTONE December 28, 2011
Iran and the United States elevated the belligerent tone between them on Wednesday over an Iranian vow to close the Strait of Hormuz, a vital Middle East waterway for oil tanker traffic, if Western powers attempted to make good on their threat to stifle Iran’s petroleum exports.
Rear Adm. Habibollah Sayyari, Iran’s naval commander, said that “Iran has total control over the strategic waterway,” and that “Closing the Strait of Hormuz is very easy for Iranian naval forces,” in remarks carried by Press TV, an official Iranian news site. Admiral Sayyari, whose forces are in the midst of an ambitious war-games exercise in waters near the Strait of Hormuz, was the second top Iranian official to make such a threat in 24 hours.
Both the Defense Department and the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which is based in Bahrain and patrols the Strait of Hormuz, responded to Admiral Sayyari’s remarks in statements that suggested American warships would stop the Iranians if necessary.
“The free flow of goods and services through the Strait of Hormuz is vital to regional and global prosperity,” Lt. Rebecca Rebarich, a spokeswoman for the Fifth Fleet command in Manama, Bahrain, said in an emailed response. “Anyone who threatens to disrupt freedom of navigation in an international strait is clearly outside the community of nations; any disruption will not be tolerated.”
The statement also said “The U.S. Navy is a flexible, multi-capable force committed to regional security and stability, always ready to counter malevolent actions to ensure freedom of navigation.”
George Little, the Pentagon press secretary, issued a similar warning, but he also pointed out that the Pentagon was “unaware of any aggressive or hostile action directed against U.S. ships” at this time.
France weighed in with a reaction to the Iranian threat as well, calling on Iran to respect international law regarding the strait, which is 21 miles wide at its narrowest point and separates Oman and Iran. Bernard Valero, a spokesman for France’s Foreign Ministry, told reporters at a regular news briefing: “The Strait of Hormuz is an international strait. As a result, all ships regardless of their nationality benefit from the right of transit in line with the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and international maritime customs.”
On Tuesday, Iran’s vice president, Mohammad Reza-Rahimi, was the first top Iranian official to explicitly threaten to close the Strait, saying that if Western powers “impose sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, then even one drop of oil cannot flow from the Strait of Hormuz.”
The catalyst for the Iranian threats are new efforts underway by the United States and European Union to pressure Iran into disbanding its nuclear program, which Iran has refused to do despite four rounds of sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council.
Those sanctions have not targeted Iran’s oil exports, the world’s third largest. But in recent weeks, the European Union has talked openly of imposing a boycott on Iranian oil, and President Obama is preparing to sign legislation that, if fully enforced, could impose harsh penalties on all buyers of Iran’s oil, with the aim of severely impeding Iran’s ability to sell it. If successful, the measure would create onerous new pressure on the Iranian economy, which is already fraying from the accumulated effects of the other sanctions.
Iran has said its uranium enrichment is purely peaceful, but an International Atomic Energy Agency report issued last month suggested that Iran may be working on a nuclear weapon and a missile delivery system for it. The United States and its allies have said that a nuclear-armed Iran would be unacceptable.
The Strait of Hormuz, with two mile-wide channels for commercial shipping, connects the Sea of Oman to the Persian Gulf, the principal loading point for oil shipped from Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter. The Strait carried 33 percent of all oil shipped by sea in 2009 and nearly 20 percent of all oil traded worldwide, according to the United States Energy Information Administration, which has called it the world’s most important “oil chokepoint.”
Markets seemed to shrug off Iran’s threats. On Wednesday, the price of the benchmark crude oil contract on the New York Mercantile Exchange fell for the first time in more than week and was trading at just below $100 a barrel at midday.
Seymour Hersh: Despite Intelligence Rejecting Iran as Nuclear Threat, US Could Be Headed for Iraq Redux by: Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez Monday 6 June 2011 .. [bits] ..
President Barack Obama: So let me be absolutely clear: we remain committed to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Its illicit nuclear program is just one challenge that Iran poses. As I said on Thursday, the Iranian government has shown its hypocrisy by claiming to support the rights of protesters while treating its own people with brutality.
then
Seymour Hersh: Well, very simply, it’s—you know, you could argue it’s 2003 all over again. Remember WMD, mushroom clouds. There’s just no serious evidence inside that Iran is actually doing anything to make a nuclear weapon. You know, making a weapon is a big deal. You have to have fabrication facilities. You have to convert a very toxic gas into a metal and then mold it into a core. It’s big stuff, and there’s no sign of any of it.
and
Seymour Hersh: Thanks a lot, Amy. Look, there’s been two very secret studies done, called National Intelligence Estimates, NIEs, and these are the most sort of sacrosanct internal studies done by the community. Almost all the time they’re private. There are studies going on, NIEs going on all the time—the situation now in Ecuador, for example, other issues. Venezuela is always looked at. The situation in the war, war-peace stuff, is constantly being looked at by groups of people in the intelligence community. And these documents are promulgated without anybody knowing it.
For some reason, in 2007 there was an NIE put out about the Iranian nuclear weapons program, and the White House wanted a summary made. And I think at that point 16 intelligence agencies were involved in the final conclusions. And internally, the guys running it, to their credit, voted 16 to nothing to say what they said, which is that, in a summary put out about the NIE—as I say, unprecedented summary—saying there’s no evidence they had done any weaponization since 2003.
And there’s a new study that was just done. It was published in February of this year. And it—we knew about it, but nobody has actually—you’re getting me in a tricky area, but I can just say, people that have worked on the study and have read the study will attest—have attested that it doesn’t take us any further. There’s no further evidence of any weaponization.
And what’s even more important that I write is that this, the latest study, was actually supposed to be promulgated—is the word they use in the community—last fall, and it was delayed because the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon intelligence agency, had an assessment that was—knocked everybody’s socks off. Their assessment was, the only reason Iran even looked at weaponization—and we’re not talking about building anything, we’re talking about doing studies, paper studies—was because they were frightened of Iraq. They had had an eight-year war, as many in your audience will remember, between 1980 and 1988, with Iraq, a terrible, brutal war. And when they—their worry was, in the early—in the 2001, 2002 period, that if Iraq went nuclear, they might need some deterrent. So what they even looked at, the papers they did, was aimed not at us or the Israelis, but aimed at the Iraqis. That didn’t get into the final judgment, but it affected the debate in a pretty positive way. .. [more] .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=63957542
============== .. this is a good one ..
Nuclear proliferation: Engaging Iran .. bits ..
This piece was written by six former ambassadors to Iran from European countries: Richard Dalton (United Kingdom), Steen Hohwü-Christensen (Sweden), Paul von Maltzahn (Germany), Guillaume Metten (Belgium), François Nicoullaud (France) and Roberto Toscano (Italy)
[...]
Is the threat to the peace, then, that Iran is actively attempting to build a nuclear weapon? For at least three years, the United States intelligence community has discounted this hypothesis. The U.S. director of national intelligence, James Clapper, testified in February to Congress: "We continue to assess Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.... We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.... We continue to judge that Iran's nuclear decision-making is guided by a cost-benefit approach, which offers the international community opportunities to influence Tehran."
Today, a majority of experts, even in Israel, seems to view Iran as striving to become a "threshold country," technically able to produce a nuclear weapon but abstaining from doing so for the present. Again, nothing in international law or in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty forbids such an ambition. Like Iran, several other countries are on their way to or have already reached such a threshold but have committed not to acquire nuclear weapons. Nobody seems to bother them.
We often hear that Iran's ill-will, its refusal to negotiate seriously, left our countries no other choice but to drag it to the Security Council in 2006. Here also, things are not quite that clear.
Let us remember that in 2005 Iran was ready to discuss a ceiling limit for the number of its centrifuges and to maintain its rate of enrichment far below the high levels necessary for weapons. Tehran also expressed its readiness to put into force the additional protocol that it had signed with the IAEA allowing intrusive inspections throughout Iran, even in non-declared sites. But at that time, the Europeans and the Americans wanted to compel Iran to forsake its enrichment program entirely.
[...]
Of course, a dilemma lingers in the minds of most of our leaders. Why offer the Iranian regime an opening that could help it restore its internal and international legitimacy? Should we not wait for a more palatable successor before making a new overture?
This is a legitimate question, but we should not overestimate the influence of a nuclear negotiation on internal developments in Iran. Ronald Reagan used to call the Soviet Union the "evil empire," but that did not stop him from negotiating intensely with Mikhail Gorbachev on nuclear disarmament. Should we blame him for having slowed down the course of history? http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=64150008
============ .. and ..
Juan Cole .. Iraq, Iran and the Nuclear Phantasm: We’ve Seen this Picture
[...] It is likely that Iran wants “nuclear latency,” [...] But the propaganda will say otherwise.
Nov 8 2011 Al Jazeera's Patty Culhane, reporting from Washington DC, said: "This is a report the US wanted the IAEA to come out with. We expect the Obama administration to use this report on the international stage to impose stricter sanctions... but to get that, they need China and Russia to get on board."
A senior US administration official told Al Jazeera: "The IAEA report does not assert that Iran has resumed a full-scale nuclear weapons programme, nor does it have a conclusion about how advanced those activities are, but clearly indicates there are activities of concern." .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=68801009
it's a long war .. 5 years of sanctions, virus attacks, assassination of top nuclear physicists .. now more .. with seemingly no good reason ..
then there was the Fatah by Khamanei against the development of nuclear weapons .. if it was broken it would be a real blow to his authority .. read it while wandering but have lost that post just now ..
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