A member of the Iranian parliament’s National Security Committee said on Monday that the military was set to practice its ability to close the Gulf to shipping at the narrow Strait of Hormuz, the most important oil transit channel in the world, but there was no official confirmation.
Very clever…..
I predict the USN will give the Straits a wide bearth to avoid a confrontation and encourage the Iranians….to foolishly evaluate the results in a vacuum.
I predict that every US satellite will be be re-tasked to monitor EVERY move the Iranians make….
Then if the Iranians do attempt such a tactic for real, they will become bottom clutter or wreckage on the Iranian coast promptly and efficiently.
No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.
Target practice!
Obama would do nothing, except maybe blame George Bush and apologize to the Mullahs.
Jimmah Cahter must be smiling now. Anything that brings turmoil in the Middle East is special to him.
He will blame the Jews for this.
mike
Note that Iran’s agenda isn’t merely ‘anti-USA’; I suggest that’s rather far down the line.
I suggest that Iran’s agenda is control of the Middle East, and that includes oil shipping giants such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Now, if Iran controls THEIR shipping ..well..that’s quite the confrontation. Who will protect Iraq and SA from Iran?
The ME takeover has been put forth before as Iran’s plan. Killing question, anybody going to stop them? Is Obama someone you want at your back?
This is something they may try while the “Zero” is POTUS but not when the job is taken over by almost any of the Repub. candidates.
History has a way of repeating.
Once upon a time countries avoided this kind of crap because they knew the president, Dem or Republican, would follow up with some action. Obozo is a joke, and they have no fear of the United States.
So Mr President Zero, how is that Keystone pipeline delay working for you? Where will you get your oil from when Iran blocks the Straits of Hormuz?
Chickens. Home. Roost. Now!
They best be putting extra emphasis on practicing their mass casualty response.
Don’t laugh. These people are serious. Who could possibly stand up to the mighty Iranian Flying Boat Squadron?
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/09/28/iran-unveils-squadrons-of-flying-boats/
Maybe we could capture one and trade it for our drone.
spindok
Yeah I don’t doubt they are serious but these “flying boats” cannot be taken seriously.
A Sopwith camel would tear them a new one….a WW1 Lewis would whack/smack them from the sky.
Although they could be somewhat stealthy, radar wise, because of composite construction….they are too small, too slow, too fragile, too lightly armed and incapable of carrying meaningful ordinance. There is perhaps some merit in a small, inexpensive, unsophistocated aircraft, available in numbers,… the counter for a cloud of knats is a whiff of RAID.
Perhaps they have a recon role but even as light attack…they are a waste……
It looks to me that Iran is confident there’s sufficient demand for ME oil, in the Asian market. The US is in a precarious position, with very few alternatives for energy independence. They realize our oilsands can’t keep up with demand, and domestic reserves need to be saved for a rainy day(you want to be the last guy in the neighbourhood with jet fuel). The US will be fighting to control Saudi oil for the foreseeable future, and rightly so. If you’ve ever driven across the US, you’d understand why they need a reliable source of cheap oil. They could devour our oilsands in the blink of an eye, then it’s back to the drawing board.
If we can just drain the last few barrels at low prices before the whole powder keg goes off…
BTW, the above comment is serious.
ET, steve and wyatt have it right.
This situation is looking a lot like the 1930s.
“They could devour our oilsands in the blink of an eye, then it’s back to the drawing board”
A, not really.
B, there is lots of oil in the Arctic
C, There is lots of oil in the shale in the Rockies.
D, Cars run great on natural gas,
E, You can make methanol out of coal, which should keep us running til the aliens visit, if we haven’t figured out fusion or clean nuk-u-lar by then.
“This situation is looking a lot like the 1930s.”
I nominate bin Laden for the role of Arch Duke, hey, it has been all one big war since the Treaty of Versailles, “The Peace to End All Peace,” as the former Kaiser called it with remarkable foresight.
Tim- All that coal, shale, and oilsand has stuff on top of it. It will come to a point where we need to expropriate every square inch of surface land, in order to access the fuel underneath.
It wasn’t all that long ago that eastern refineries were buying Saudi oil for $1 a barrel, delivered. That’s why Alberta oil was a hard sell, and we had the 1981 battle with Eastern Canada. OPEC jacked up the price of ME oil, but really, it could still be profitable at $1 a barrel. The other $99 is just extortion money, not production cost. On the other hand, our high priced oil has become more competitive. Oil is a very complicated commodity. Everyone has an opinion, but most have no clue what happens behind the scenes.
“Tim- All that coal, shale, and oilsand has stuff on top of it. It will come to a point where we need to expropriate every square inch of surface land, in order to access the fuel underneath.”
Coach, please look up Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage, and then we can talk.
that ethical oil in the oilsands is the second largest reserve in the world. just a low rate of production relative to its size.
at the beginning of the korean war the US needed a big source of copper for shells , Anaconda/Butte in Montana was that source therefore needed a large source of fuel , gas. The Montana Power company had gas reserves in Canada , a deal was made in Ottawa in less than a week , surveyors went out and the line was built in less than a year for gas export permit number one. no fuss , no muss , crisis make instant decisions even for gubmints
how does that ethical saudi oil look now?
I hope Ezra covers this tonight.
…”The US will be fighting to control Saudi oil for the foreseeable future, and rightly so…”They could devour our oilsands in the blink of an eye, then it’s back to the drawing board.”
Coach
I have read somewhere that if all oil production in the world would stop except for the oil sands, there is theoretically enough to supply the world’s current demand for the next 50 years…That means the US would not “devour it in a blink of an eye” and thus protecting “ME oil” is not the end all that it once was, because anything over 50$ a barrel is worth exploiting the oil sands. The world will never see oil that cheap ever again so that means the oil sands have become extremely important.
Right now, Canada is sitting on the second largest oil deposit after the ME.
Washington is totally corrupt and largely controlled by OPEC and the Saudi sheikhs, this is partly why Obama is blocking the pipeline and that North American energy exploitation is all but halted or forbidden and this started way before Obama took office.
If the next POTUS (Unless it’s Barry again which we all know by now is a pure puppet) does not kick start the North American economy by aggressively deregulating and opening up domestic energy exploitation in order to eventually flood the market and break the world price monopoly in order to bring back manufacturing competitiveness home, we will then be certain that true US Democracy is dead and that the Republic is no longer sovereign instead controlled by a cabal of globalist entity of sorts.
IMO
Can you say $200 per barrel, do I hear $210…
cgh- I work in the industry, so I don’t really need to look this stuff up. No matter what kind of technology you’re talking about, you still need surface facilities, and that is getting harder and harder to accommodate. Land owners, agriculture, environmental concerns, construction costs, production costs, water sources, water disposal, trucking, pipelines, and the big one, price fluctuations. The only way to exploit the oilsands to anywhere near estimated reserves is conventional strip mining. Do you really believe that’s going to happen, in a free market society, with property rights? It would entail stripping the overburden on about 10% of Alberta’s land mass. Drilling into the formation, and draining it would only exploit about 5% of reserves. Of course, all my numbers are just guesses, same as all yours.
tim, the former Kaiser had it right.
George Boosh would probably have told these rectums he has a nuke with their name on it, end of problem:-))))
I’ll repeat; the big worry is Iran’s imperialist agenda over the other Islamist nations – the arab peoples (Iranians are Persian).
The ones to be worried are Iraq and Saudi Arabia. And Afghanistan- not for oil- but for its connection to Pakistan..which would readily become an ally of Iran.
Can the ME count on the US? Absolutely not – under Obama. Here’s a PJ critical comment on Obama, as written by a Democratic Congressman.
Note also in the comments, there’s a Youtube of Obama awarding the Medal of Honor to a soldier; Obama the Chief Narcissist refers to Himself in the first minute of his speech..no less than six times.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2011/12/13/dem-congressman-obama-would-rather-be-university-professor-than-president/
Would China side with the West? Or with Iran? What about Russia?
The key problem in the Middle East is their medieval era tribalism – and the dictators and Islamists will go to war rather than give up their power to The People. They’ll have to, eventually, but they aren’t going to do so without a fight.
My suggestion is to enable the West to reduce its reliance on ME oil – Obama’s current Yet Another Error is to delay the Keystone Pipeline from Canada. Then, allow the ME to fight it out amongst themselves. Democracy is inevitable and might require first, a phoenix-like flaming.
And there’s also the US Drone that the Iranians have captured. A LOT of people, including Cheney, are asking: why didn’t Obama just, from the air, blow it up rather than allowing a highly technical device to fall into Iranian hands intact?
Apparently, Obama had three options on his desk, all enabling the destruction of the drone. He rejected all of them. Instead, he has asked (nicely), for Iran to return the drone to the US.
Is he that dumb? Is he that narcissistic? Is he that egotistical? And further, is he that indifferent to the wellbeing of the USA? The answer is ‘Yes’ to all.
Although, as someone else has remarked – “It’s hard to come to a decision on issues like this when you are out playing golf or on the campaign dinner trail”.
Long past time we stopped feeding these slaver regimes, money for their blood oil. Where paying them to undermine our own civilization.
They better not. No, Really. They better not.
US can’t be too concerned. They have 8 deployable carrier groups; right now, 3 are in their home ports, with another on the way home, and the Abraham Lincoln only left Seattle last week en route to the Gulf region. Same thing with the big deck amphibious support ships; only one is active in the Gulf region. (Stratfor.com publishes a weekly map; free registration req’d)
Some interesting theories about the drone over at Zerohedge. The paranoid believe that the drone’s control system was hacked (probably by the Chinese) and that the whole drone program is in danger; the conspiracy theorists believe that the drone is a Trojan horse, with hidden viruses to cripple Iranian (and eventually Chinese, of course) defence systems. The latter believe that Bambam’s plea for the drone’s return is just part of the charade.
Agree with the poster above that the US would track every movement by Iran. It makes you question the strategic judgement of the Iranians; if you were a football coach, would you pre-announce a full pad practice in full view of the opposition, so that they would know your game plan in advance?
Posted by: cgh at December 13, 2011 1:21 PM:
My specialty!
One missile every six hours in Irans military headquarters for three days.
And a couple each day, on major highways leaving said HQ.
Problem solved.
USA is not dependant on ME oil. To my knowledge they import 1.5 million bpd from there out of a total import of +/- 10 million bpd. Out of 84 million bpd consumed internationally the ME produces +/- 22 million bpd, most of which passes through the Straits of Hormuz(?).
The strategic consideration, I guess, is that whoever controls ME oil can dictate to a degree the foreign policy of the recipients. Euroland, China and Japan are all big customers. Not only that but whoever controls that cash flow can finance any military buildup that could be desired. They would become an overnight superpower. While the Saudis are playing that card today it is obvious that Iran wants that opportunity. The USA, Israel and Saudi Arabia are saying no!
Japan attacked the USA in 1941 because their flow of oil had been embargoed. Not only is oil a trade issue it is a national security issue for those that need it. The covert war against Iran will continue and could escalate as their Bomb research gets closer to completion.