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To avoid war, Iran must stop playing games

By Michael Burleigh for the Daily Mail
Updated: 03:56 EST, 25 January 2012

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US, British and French warships have proceeded without hindrance through the Strait of Hormuz, led by the US carrier Abraham Lincoln, with its 90 fighters on board.

This coincides with the EU decision to impose oil sanctions on Iran, honouring existing contracts until 1 July, but immediately banning any new ones.

This means that primarily Greece and Italy will have to look elsewhere for a significant percentage of their oil. The Saudis will increase production to cover the shortfall. The EU will shortly introduce sanctions on the Bank of Iran too.

Warship: The American aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has sailed through the Strait of Hormuz, while the EU has imposed an oil embargo on Iran

Iran is also losing customers for its oil in Asia. India and Japan are likely to comply with US requests that they cease purchasing Iranian crude, leaving China as the largest purchaser, and they will be driving a hard bargain about price. When push comes to shove, nor will China allow Iran to mess up its overall relations with the West, or indeed with Saudi Arabia, with whom they also do much trade.

Iran has also been caught red-handed camouflaging Syrian oil as its own, for Syria is already under a separate US and EU embargo because of the violence of the Assad regime.

A Greek-owned tanker chartered in Dubai tried to ship 91,000 metric tons of oil from Baniyas in Syria to Iran's Ras Bahregan terminal. Registered in Liberia, the tanker's owners suddenly found their ship and its cargo uninsurable after intervention by the US Treasury.

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Turkey is also banning arms flights from Iran to Syria passing through its air space, as is Lithuania with arms flights from Russia's enclave at Kaliningrad.

For in its determination to poke the West in the eye, Russia is taking its own idiosyncratic line on Iran, fearing western regional expansion to combat such a thing more than it fears an Iranian bomb.

So far the Iranians have not responded to the multinational fleet that has just sailed through the Straits of Hormuz. They are wise to do so since in addition to the USS Abraham Lincoln's 90 planes, there are 90 more on the USS Carl Vinson, which is hovering not far away. There are also huge US bases in nearby Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar.

Until Iran has a short to medium range missile capacity to disrupt such facilities, they would be very unwise to pick a fight with an opponent that can easily escalate proceedings way beyond Iran's capabilities. Like B-2 stealth bombers that can drop MOP: a 30,000lbs Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs that can go through hundreds of feet of earth to detonate with the force of an earthquake.

One final point is worth making. The usual suspects constantly trot out the line that this is all about US oil. Of course it isn't, since the US has quietly announced that it is achieving oil self-sufficency, and will be exporting natural gas too for the next century, thanks to fracturing (or fracking) techniques on shale deposits of both. If anything it is about Chinese, Japanese, Greek and Italian oil. Not ours, since we in the UK get no oil from Iran at all.

This crisis is about how to reconcile Iran's desire for nuclear power with the need to curb the proliferation of nuclear weapons in a volatile part of the world.

The prospect of an Egyptian or Saudi bomb is only marginally less frightening than one in the hands of the Iranian mullahs.

The only alternative to war is for Iran to stop playing games, allow in IAEA inspectors, and start negotiating in earnest. Otherwise the Islamic regime faces ruination.