Iran Threatens Strait of Hormuz

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The New York Sun

WASHINGTON — Two days after a diplomatic deadline passed for Iran to end the reprocessing and enrichment of uranium, the chief of the country’s Revolutionary Guard force is threatening to close down one of the world’s most critical oil shipping passageways, the Strait of Hormuz.

The Revolutionary Guard commander, Mohammad Ali Jafari, spoke to Iranian reporters after testing a new antiship missile that he said could sink “enemy ships” at a range of more than 200 miles. He said shutting down the Strait of Hormuz would be easy.

“Enemies know that we are easily able to block the Strait of Hormuz for an unlimited period,” Iran’s official news service, the Islamic Republic News Agency, quoted Major General Jafari as saying.

A spokesman yesterday for Central Command, the battle space that includes the Strait of Hormuz, said the American military doubted the Iranians had the antiship missile they claimed to have tested. “We do not assess the Iranians to have any new capabilities as mentioned by their Revolutionary Guard commander,” Lieutenant Commander Bill Speaks said.

Nonetheless, the test and statements are a pointed rebuff to the Bush administration, which recently dispatched the State Department’s third-ranking diplomat, William Burns, to Geneva to convey to the Iranians an offer to freeze diplomatic sanctions in exchange for the suspension of enrichment and reprocessing.

Le Monde published Monday what it claimed were minutes of Mr. Burns’s meeting with the chief Iranian nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili. According to the minutes, Mr. Burns was deferential. He said: “I am happy to transmit a simple message. The United States is serious in their support of their offering of cooperation and a way forward. We are serious in the search for a diplomatic solution. The relations between our two countries have been based on a profound mistrust for 30 years. I hope that my presence today is a step in a good direction and that you seize the opportunity.”

This is not the first time the Iranians have threatened to shut down the strait as retaliation for any military strike on their nuclear program. Responding to those threats in June, Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff said during a press conference at the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama, Bahrain: “No one will close the Strait of Hormuz. They are not going to close it because they will not be allowed to.”

That said, many analysts say Iran has the ability to temporarily disrupt the Strait of Hormuz, a passageway whence one fifth of the world’s oil is shipped every day destined to the markets of China and East Asia.

An official for Central Command yesterday who asked not to be identified, however, said the Iranians had the capacity to wage a form of terrorism on the high seas and target commercial shipping vessels. “As to their claim they can close the straits, they could certainly have the capability to disrupt commercial activity in the strait. We do not assess them as capable of sustaining that disruption.”

A former CIA Middle East analyst and a scholar at the Brookings Institution, Kenneth Pollack, said he believed that Iran’s threats to close the Strait of Hormuz were “hollow.” “In a no-holds-barred fight with the United States Navy and Air Force, Iran might be able to inflict some painful losses, but its doom would be certain.” Mr. Pollack added: “In the interim, Iran might be able to frighten commercial traffic away from the straits for a matter of days or even a few weeks. It might also take down an American warship or two. However, neither would be likely to have a lasting impact on global oil supplies or the overall military balance. And in the end, Iran’s military capacities would be crippled.”

A senior market analyst at Alaron Trading, a commodity brokerage firm, Phil Flynn, said a confrontation in the Strait of Hormuz could raise the price of a barrel of oil by ten dollars. “We will assess if this is a onetime attack, an ongoing war, will the straits be reopened? A lot of this is speculation, when it would happen, how bad it would be,” Mr. Flynn said. He added: “If there was some kind of attack, it would be military suicide for Iran if they did this. There would be a swift retaliation one way or another. Too many countries want those straits to remain open.”

A recent study by a fellow at Harvard’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Caitlin Talmadge, warned that Iran could use mines as well as missiles to block the strait, and that “it could take many weeks, even months, to restore the full flow of commerce, and more time still for the oil markets to be convinced that stability had returned.”

Despite the Iran jitters, the price of petroleum fell to its lowest price since May, largely based on news that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will increase production and that the original estimates for oil demand appear to be dropping. Mr. Flynn yesterday said that an “Iran premium” was already built into the price of oil. He said that premium “goes up and down depending on the headline. It can be as small as 3 dollars a barrel to as much as 7 or 8 dollars a barrel.”

Meanwhile in Washington, a spokesman for the State Department said that all five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany had agreed to begin drawing up new diplomatic penalties for Iran in light of the lapsed negotiations deadline of August 2. “In the absence of a clear, positive response from Iran, we have no choice but to pursue other measures against Iran,” a spokesman for the State Department, Gonzo Gallegos, said.

Iranian press reports, however, indicated that the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, spoke by phone with Mr. Jalili yesterday, suggesting that more negotiations would continue.


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