This is going to end badly, mark my words.
In case you aren’t familiar with maritime law, piracy is when you seize someone else’s ship in international waters – unless you’re a government and you’re doing it as part of “sanctions”, i.e.: an economic blockade. In that situation, maritime law is superceeded by international law, which says a blockade is an act of war Mao’s law, which says “power comes from the barrel of a gun.”
In case you’ve forgotten: all of this is to “free” the Iranian people from an oppressive regime. I.e.: it’s humanitarian. Keep that in mind.
So, July 5, British marines stormed aboard an Iranian oil tanker near Gibraltar. [capt]:
“Take the long way around”
This seems to be particularly cruel: let them go the entire way around the Cape of Good Hope and then stop them at Gibraltar.
The British say that they’ll let the ship go if Iran promises that the oil is not destined for Syria, and Iran points out that the ship was rented and it’s just carrying stuff and, besides, the British are acting like pirates. The whole issue of the ship’s registry (Panama) is irrelevant because it’s Iranian oil in it and that’s what matters; never mind that the whole notion of ships being “registered” to sail under the flag of some nation or other is a sop to nationalism in order to guarantee safe transit on the high seas. [The Grace 1 is Iranian owned, Panama registered and crewed by Indians]
Where Iran screwed up is they didn’t label it a “freedom of navigation exercise” like the US navy does when they sail warships into China’s back yard. Well, as Mao didn’t quite say, “the key word there is ‘warships’.”
That’s all the context for earlier this week, when Iran attempted to (apparently) capture a British oil tanker on July 11. [cnn] The British “happened” to have a military ship standing by, which foiled their plan. Presumably the Iranians now realize that their communications security systems have been totally backdoored by NSA and GCHQ and that the HMS Montrose was standing by for a reason. There was:
A US aircraft was overhead and recorded video of the incident
I bet. The Iranians walked into a trap; they are lucky nobody was killed.
HMS Montrose “got between them and issued a verbal warning to withdraw.
Nothing encourages small boats to withdraw like a verbal warning from a frigate that is pointing 30mm guns at them.
That summarizes the state of play in the early opening moves of the game. The most recent move was Iranian, in which they appear to be going for a trade, by grabbing another Panamanian-registered ship, the Riah, which they claim is smuggling oil. [guard] That’s actually fairly normal – remember how I said, earlier, that “sanctions” and “tariffs” are just externally imposed price controls? It’s a fairly well-known thing that tankers buy oil, sail off, then turn off their transponders and offload the oil to another ship at sea for a handy profit. In fact, Russians do it all the time – smuggling oil to: North Korea. [bi]
The transfers in October and November indicate that smuggling from Russia to North Korea has evolved to loading cargoes at sea since Reuters reported in September that North Korean ships were sailing directly from Russia to their homeland.
“Russian vessels have made ship-to-ship transfers of petrochemicals to North Korean vessels on several occasions this year in breach of sanctions,” the first security source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.
The Yuk Tang (N Korea) offloading from the Ocean Explorer
There are websites operated by nerdy people who track oil tankers and their transponders. [tankertrackers] This stuff is an open secret, i.e.: it gets published about in the newspapers. [jakarta] Iranian and other oil gets smuggled all over the planet:
A tanker carrying Iranian fuel oil in violation of U.S. sanctions has unloaded the cargo into storage tanks near the Chinese city of Zhoushan, according to ship tracking data on Refinitiv Eikon.
The discharging of the nearly 130,000 tonnes of Iranian fuel oil onboard the tanker, the Marshal Z, confirmed by a representative of the oil storage terminal, marks the end of an odyssey for the cargo that began four months ago.
See what I mean about sanctions amounting to externally-imposed price controls? I don’t see why the US and Britain don’t just send a payment demand: “Hey, send us our cut of the transaction” issued by a sleepy-eyed guy in a raincoat. Basically, that’s what’s going on. And all of this is for the “Freedoms” of the Iranian people.
The ship transponder tech sounds interesting. Apparently some of these smugglers are able to squawk a fake registration. So the Yuk Tang disappears and a few days later the Summer Sun shows up in the same area. This whole thing sounds remarkably like 18th-century smugglers, pirates, and slavers – except that now they have anti-ship missiles that can sink eachother from over the horizon.
Article titles like NPR’s:
Iran Says Its Revolutionary Guard Seized Foreign Oil Tanker In Strait Of Hormuz
What can I say? That’s brilliant! It’s nice of NPR to make sure we understand that the Iranians didn’t seize one of their own ships. After all, that’s certainly a possibility.
Claiming that “it’s for their own good” is the oldest trick in the book. Whenever somebody gets abused, denied freedom to decide for themselves, objectified, patronized, discriminated, killed, etc., then the abuser will always claim that it’s for the victim’s benefit.
Bolton seems to be leading a small cohort of folks in the US gov who are salivating for a war with Iran for some reason (perhaps being dropped on the head as a child?) Twenty years ago we would have said “because we want unfettered access to their oil,” but I don’t see how that can be, because a) we saw how well that worked in Iraq, and b) we could get a lot better access just by dropping sanctions and trading with them. Maybe just general Repub enthusiasm about killing brown people?
I know there is a similar warmongering faction in Iran. (The greatest tragedy of Trump’s so-called “diplomacy” is that it has vastly strengthened this group.) However, it’s got to be a minority in both countries. This war is going to be an extremely tough sell regardless of who messes around with whose boats. If you were a Fox administration PR lackey, how would you try to spin up the outrage machine? (Especially for the benefit of their #1 viewer on Pennsylvania Ave.)
I’m also curious about what role the UK will take going forward. Surely everyone has got to realize that trying to start a war when your government is barely functional can’t be a great idea. “We’re heading for a cliff and the steering wheel just broke off. Hey, I know — let’s set the car on fire!”
It seems to me most of this started due Trump pulling out of the Iran deal. Now the US is asking the international community (or at least the EU) for help in keeping the peace (or starting the war… you never know…)
Oddly enough I see an easy solution:
If the US wants the international community’s help in cleaning up Trump’s mess, they can set demands: “Reinstate the Iran deal.” Trump can get to back out of his earlier decision without losing too much face “it’s still a bad deal, but the EU wants it.” Iran gets their sanctions lifted. Everyone happy.
Now I know there are no easy solutions in the Middle East, so where is my idea wrong?
LMFTFY: Chicken with Oil Tankers
I may well be wrong but my bet is that in a short war the Irani will kick the US ass.
In a longer war, 5 or 6 years and a few hundred thousand US casualties the US wins
jrkrideau:
Excellent. Let us make a bet.
Surely you’re not only talking about casualties, right? Because I hardly see the USA having more of those.
(You do know how much the USA spends on its military, and how it compares to other world powers, right?)
Anyway. What would be your criteria for a
“winning”“kick-ass” performance?Set them out, let’s bet. Virtually, of course.
(If the USA loses another trillion dollars or so, what would be the difference to the Iraq/Afghanistan wars? No biggie for the average citizen/undocumented)
Hm. That sounds like the exact opposite of the Iraq war. What’s the difference here. In particular, why would the the U.S. win long-term in Iran when they’ve lost so badly in Iraq?
I would bet the US would win short-term and lose the insurgency.
I agree with Marcus Ranum here.
The U.S. is pretty good at invading places. We just can’t really figure out what to do afterwards…
That might make for a fun stealth/deception game
dangerousbeans, it’s called “battleship”. ;)
What does “win” mean in this context?
As for what would count as a short-term ass-kicking for the US, I’d say losing a carrier would fit the bill. Whether the Iranians have the capability I couldn’t say, but you can bet they’ve studied the results of the Millennium Challenge 2002 closely. (Previous relevant discussion at stderr: An Iran Scenario.)
What does “win” mean in this context?
The US could destroy structural government power in the country (i.e.: beat the government) fairly quickly, I suspect – especially if it did not care about the level of slaughter that entailed. Its attempt to establish a puppet government, which would inevitably follow, would be a failure.
I don’t want to make the effort to try to survey and summarize but it seems that the media’s reporting of the tanker war is mostly focused on the British tanker that was seized, not the Iranian tanker the British seized first.
Gibraltar is narrow (like the Strait of Hormuz!) and is a strategic choke-point that the British only depend on during times of war. So, the Iranians were reasonable to be shocked that the British would capture one of their ships – after all, “EU sanctions” are hardly the law of the high seas. But it’s “we don’t care if you respect our sanctions – our sanctions respect you” – basic law of force. Which is the same thing the Iranians did, for what it’s worth.
I think Iran’s move was interesting and judicious but very dangerous. The powerful do not tolerate the less powerful playing the game the same way they do.
One thing that comes out of this is the rather obvious weakness of the royal navy, which has been cost-cut to a nub. The Montrose is the only asset the Brits have in the area and it can’t cover enough space to do anything useful. I suspect the Brits’ next reaction will be to put royal marines on the ships transiting the strait, then take them off at the other side. They will not provoke a shooting war because they don’t have enough forces in the area – Iran would fairly easily sink them, which would amount to sinking most of the operational royal navy. Remember, the royal navy hasn’t got aircraft or a functional aircraft carrier – they’re floating ducks.
The US is sending more naval assets to the area. That increases the chance of some trigger-happy yutz like the former captain of the Vincennes winding up in the area.
It’s a scary time.
I believe the “It’s different when we do it” protocol applies here…
Pompeo on British ships: [fox]
In other words: “This situation that has arisen because we asked you to seize that Iranian ship – you’re on your own! Bet you wish you still had a navy, brexit-boy!”