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TripMyWire is een vrijplaats voor journalistieke producties en bespiegelingen op het mediavak. Daar horen ook Engelstalige producties bij. De auteur van deze analyse, Antonie van Campen, studeert op dit moment in Denemarken waar ze deelneemt aan het programma Europe in the World.

Strait of Hormuz: a sea-passage of great strategic importance

Global sea trade is an important factor in the hostile war of words between the US and Iran. Could the world’s most important waterway be a possible casus belli?

Oil tankers continue to navigate the Strait of Hormuz where the USS Vincennes last Sunday launched missiles against the civilian Iranian Airbus and blasted it from the sky. ‘‘We are a U.S. warship operating in international waters. Please identify yourself and state your intentions.’’ (…)

This was the opening of an American newspaper on July 9, 1988.1 The reason was an unofficial Naval war between the United States and Iran for control over the Persian Gulf. This ‘Tanker War’ started when Iraq attacked Iranian tankers and oil terminals in 1984. Ships belonging to other nations, however, came also under attack in the Gulf waters. Under international law, an attack on such ships was then treated as an attack on the United States, allowing the U.S Navy to retaliate. And so they did.


Forgotten War
This relatively forgotten ‘Tanker War’ took place in one of the planets most vital waterways: the Strait of Hormuz. It is the only sea-passage for the export of oil from the Persian Gulf states. Through its waters, in giant ocean-going tankers, pass much of the oil from Bahrein, Iran, Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. This Strait has been the focus of repeated military tension between Iran and the west since the Iranian revolution in 1979.2 Today, both the United States and Iran are engaged in a hostile war of words, which many observers fear may lead to military conflict again.

Geographical importance
‘If you want to understand the policy of a country, look at the map!’ advised Napoleon. He said this because it is geography that decides the basic interest of a state. Geography stands forever, while rulers, regimes and ideologies rise and fall. Thus, in order to understand the recent hostile war of words and the conflicts in the past between the US and Iran, we also have to look at the map. What we see is a narrow sea passage that connects the Persian Gulf to the Oman Sea. It is a strategic channel at the entrance to the Gulf and therefore the world’s most important waterway or choke point because of the huge volume of oil exported through it daily.

This oil flows through the Strait and account for roughly two-fifths of all globally traded oil, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). Some 16-17 million barrels of oil are carried through the narrow channel on oil tankers every day, that is ninety percent of oil exported from Gulf producers. The EIA predicts that oil exports passing through the Strait will even double to between 30 million and 34 million barrels per day (bpd) by 2020.3

Oil dependency can lead to blackmail
The United States is the world’s largest oil consumer and import 60 percent of its oil. Over 95 percent of this oil arrives by sea. Since the 9/11 attacks the US national discourse is increasingly focused on the impact on American national security of increasing dependence on Middle East oil. Of course, Saudi Arabia is still the world’s largest oil producer and it controls the majority of the world’s excess production capacity, while the Persian Gulf today ‘only’ represents 25-30% of world oil supply. The level of the Saudi spare capacity, however, has fallen in recent years. That means that the sudden loss of the Saudi oil network could paralyze the global economy. For that reason, the United States has interest in preventing any hostile state or internal groups from gaining control over the Persian Gulf region. They could use this control to blackmail the world community.

Iran is a state that might be able and willing to do this. It has threatened several times already to close the Strait of Hormuz, since it has been accused of making nuclear weapons. Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a June 2006 speech that if any country would attack Iran, ‘shipment of energy from this region will be seriously jeopardized’. He continued that the US and its allies will not be able to provide security to all the shipments that transit close to Iran’s coast.

Tensions between the West and Iran
The official reason why the United States might want to attack Iran is because they claim for several years now, that the country wants to produce nuclear weapons. President Bush therefore included Iran as part of the ‘axis of evil’ during his State of the Union in 2002. Last December, however, a US intelligence organ claimed that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003.6 Bush said immediately that this only proved that Iran was a threat to the US, but he was actually left without a reason to continue his march toward war with Iran.

After the publication of this intelligence report, the speedboat incident took place in the Strait of Hormuz. US officials claimed that Iranian boats harassed and provoked three US Navy ships. This incident would have enable Bush to portray Iran once again as the aggressor in the current tensions with the United States. But the Iran’s English-language Press- TV broadcasted a video showing an Iranian commander in a speedboat contacting an American sailor via radio, asking him to identify the US vessels and state their purpose. US officials later on explicitly admitted that the voice was not coming from the Iranian side and a third party was involved in the incident. This means that it was just the work of pranksters.

New measures against Iran
Thus, tensions are heating op between the two nations and the Unites States recently partially succeeded in convincing its allies to adopt a new resolution on Iran’s nuclear program. This resolution will propose restrictions on cargo to and from Iran, travel bans and asset freezes for people involved in the program and monitoring of Iranian financial institutions, according to a draft text circulated last Friday.8 The proposals were agreed to in a meeting in Berlin of the foreign ministers of Germany and the five permanent members of the Council. They were distributed in text form to the 10 non-permanent members of the Council as elements of a resolution the panel hopes to adopt by mid-February. The Council has twice voted to impose sanctions to stop Iran from enriching uranium, in December 2006 and March 2007. The elements of this third measure tighten and extend earlier ones but do not go significantly beyond them.9

These new measures would also ban all trade and supply of so-called dual-use items, materials and technologies that can have both civilian and military uses. The new sanctions resolution would, for the first time, authorize inspections of air and sea cargo going in and out of Iran. Iran, which has defied the first two resolutions and continued its uranium enrichment, has already said it will not respond to any additional pressure.

The US, however, had also hoped for unilateral measures, which it had imposed last year on select Iranian banks and elements of Iran’s military. Than, the US tried to pressure European governments to block transactions by Iranian banks and to freeze assets of some Iranian companies. Europe refused, probably because it has more commercial and economic ties with Iran than the Unites States does.10 The EU is Iran’s biggest trading partner, with Germany making up a hefty share. If there are sanctions or conflict there is more to loose for these EU countries. But now they are cutting down on export credits to Iran. Big European companies, however, like Siemens (Germany) and Total (French) do business with Iran, although they may decide to hold back from future contracts. According to the Economist, European leaders are already discouraging their companies from making further investments in Iran.11

Can Iran close the Strait of Hormuz?
The possibility of military intervention in Iran from the US, has been significantly reduced since the US intelligence report came out. The report says that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons programme in 2003, and therefore, it is a much harder task for the Bush administration to make people think that Iran is still a dangerous county with a nuclear threat. Because of the sanctions however, adopted last week by the Security Council, it remains unsure what Iran will do. The Financial Times reported this week that Iran Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said that the UN Security Council ‘should wait for the next report from the IAEA, before adopting a third resolution against Tehran.12 He said that Iran otherwise would respond ‘seriously’ to hasty action. If the resolution is passed…we will have a serious and logical reaction which we will announce later,” Mottaki told a press conference in Tehran.

The possibility exists that Iran wants to close the Strait of Hormuz, although it is more likely that Iran would do that only if the US uses military force. If there would be a strike against Iran’s nuclear program, it will probably be met with an effort to choke off oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, military planners and Middle East analysts say. The goal would be to trigger a market disruption that would force President George W. Bush to back off. ‘If Iran tries to close the Strait of Hormuz, it is probably the biggest single energy-security risk that exists in the world’, says Lawrence Eagles in the Wall Street Journal.13 He is the head of oil markets at the International Energy Agency, the Paris-based energy watchdog for the word’s most industrialized nations. “There is a lot of discussion on these issues, and from an energy-security perspective, it would be very welcome to have any opportunity to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.”

Most security and region analysts, however, doubt Iran’s ability to block exports for any amount of time. ‘Although a closure of the Strait of Hormuz would shock oil markets and reverberate throughout the global economy, the effect would be felt greatest inside Iran’, said Frank Verrastro , the director of the Energy and National Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington in the International Oil Daily.14 ‘The impact would be huge on Iran. That’s their revenue stream’ Verrastro said. ‘Iran produces roughly 3.9 million b/d and petroleum exports earned the country roughly $59 billion in 2006, more than 90% of the country’s total export revenues, according to the most recent available Opec data. It would not be in their interest, politically or economically,’ to risk a closure, Verrastro argues. ‘If the strait was slammed shut, he added, the first thing you would see is a price impact, likely followed by a, global reaction to militarily reopen it.

Bronnen:
1 The Toronto Star, July 9, 1988, Saturday, Aftermath of a tragedy Blood rage and power politics
2 http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2236799,00.html
3 FACTBOX-The Strait of Hormuz, Iran and the risk to oil, 27 Mar 2007 / Source: Reuters/ http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L27344177.htm
4 FACTBOX-The Strait of Hormuz, Iran and the risk to oil, 27 Mar 2007 / Source: Reuters/ http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L27344177.htm
5 The Economist, June 10, 2006 U.S. Edition. Risky bargaining; Iran and nuclear diplomacy
6 www.dni.gov/press_releases/20071203_release.pdf
7 BBC Monitoring Middle East – Political, Supplied by BBC Worldwide Monitoring. January 14, 2008 , Strait of Hormuz incident work of “pranksters” - Iran TV
8 The New York Times, January 26, 2008 Saturday.Late Edition – Final, Draft of New Iran Sanctions Restricts Cargo and Travel
9 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/26/world/26nations.html?ref=todayspaper
10 The International Herald Tribune, January 31, 2007,Europe resists U.S. on Iran sanctions; Strong economic ties to Tehran and its oil cited as the problem
11 http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=10125367
12 Financial Times , January 29, 2008 , Iran warns UN on resolution
13 Wall Street Journal, August 27, 2007,What happens if Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz?
14 International Oil Daily, January 9, 2008 Wednesday. US-Iran Encounter Highlights Chokepoint Risk in Global Oil Trade