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Blockade of the Strait of Hormuz

by Finian Cunningham

Global Research, April 22, 2010

Given the crescendo of veiled and increasingly unveiled military threats by the US and Israel against Iran, one has to admire the Iranians for their coolness under extreme pressure. The latest despicable – and in some legal opinion, criminal – threat by the White House that it would use atomic weapons against nuclear-unarmed Iran in the event of a conflict has been dismissed by the authorities in Tehran, who say they remain determined to pursue their civilian nuclear energy programme.

Far from being cowered, Iran has just launched three days of military war games in the Persian Gulf. The Islamic Republic carries out such manoeuvres every summer, but this year it has brought the exercises forward. No official explanation has been given, but it clearly is meant to be a signal to the US and its coterie of western allies that Iran will not be brow beaten by threats of economic sanctions and military strikes, including the threat of unleashing the most terrifying of weapons.

In this game of high-stakes poker, how is it that Iran can stay so composed? It is because Iran holds the ultimate weapon, not a weapon of mass destruction that the US claims it is seeking, but a weapon of mass disruption firmly within its grasp and ready to trigger immediately – the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

This is the narrow stretch of sea between Iran and the United Arab Emirates and Oman to its south that connects the Persian Gulf to open international waters. Some 40 per cent of global ship-borne crude oil passes through this channel every day. According to the US-based Energy Information Administration, an average of 15 tankers carry 16-17 million tonnes of crude oil through the Strait daily. Oil producers in the Gulf, including the world’s top supplier, Saudi Arabia, are totally dependent on this passage for their oil exports, which account for 80-90 per cent these countries’ total revenues. This is the world’s most sensitive choke-point for oil trade.

Iran has previously said that if it is attacked by the US or its allies it will blockade the Strait, and no doubt the current war games in the Gulf are aimed at underlining this warning. But it is only recently that Iran has acquired the maritime capability to deliver on its counter-threat. For example, during the 1980-88 war with Iraq when Iran was being bombed with chemical weapons by US client Saddam Hussein, Tehran did not have the capability to shut off the Strait. Nor in 1988 when the US shot down an Iranian civilian airline, killing 290 people onboard.

But over the last few years, Iran has invested heavily in building up a fleet of high-speed military boats equipped with anti-ship missiles and sonar-evading torpedoes. And it can be safely assumed that the Iranians have perfected maneouvres to ensure the rapid and complete shut-down of all shipping out of the Gulf. This task is made all the more feasible by the natural geography of the Strait. The Persian Gulf is a shallow sea so any ships that are sunk would represent hazardous obstacles that could not be easily removed. Also, although the Strait is some 20 miles across, the shipping traffic lanes are only six miles wide: two miles for incoming tankers, two for outgoing and two miles for a separation margin between both.

Under international maritime law, Iran (along with Oman) has sovereign territorial rights over these waters. Iran has under United Nations law agreed to grant "innocent passage" to ships through its waters provided there is no infringement of its security. Therefore, as energy analyst Ali Mallakin points out, Iran has the legal right to withhold passage if "its sovereignty is not respected" such as if the US were to launch a unilateral military strike against the country.

By that stage, of course, the argument will be merely academic. For the US will have launched yet another criminal war and the world economy will be plunged into darkness. Given the fragile state of the international economy, shutting off the Strait of Hormuz will explode the price of oil and with that any vain hope of economic recovery. Sitting under a multi-trillion-dollar mountain of debt, the US has furthest to crash and the social implications for this crumbling empire – already seething from widespread misery – cannot be overstated. The consequences for the US will quite possibly be more powerful than those from any weapon of mass destruction.

Both Iran and the US know this. Despite the chips that Washington is piling on to the poker table, both players know that it is Tehran that holds the high ace. That’s why the US will not dare gamble a war on Iran. And it will keep its Israeli attack dog muzzled.

Finian.cunningham@gmail.com

Finian Cunningham is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Finian Cunningham

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18799

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by Fawzia Sheikh

Global Research, December 22, 2009

OilPrice.com – 2009-12-18

China’s completion of an historic natural gas pipeline with Kazakhstan bypassing Russia this week tightens the Asian behemoth’s grip on energy resources needed to fuel a burgeoning economy, a desire also forcing it on a quest for oil and gas wealth in other corners of the globe.

China is not alone in this scramble for energy security. Hungry for oil and gas, world powers like Russia and the United States are also relying on different strategies to grab resource treasures but their efforts have raised questions about conflicts down the road.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration describes China as the second largest energy consumer behind the United States . Taking advantage of the world’s financial crisis, the Asian powerhouse has tapped currency reserves to invest in both Russia and Central Asia , helping to construct power plants and other domestic infrastructure in return for long-term oil and gas supplies, said Ben Montalbano, a senior research analyst at the Washington-based Energy Policy Research Foundation.

Lacking energy reserves, China has been “working hard to lock in” investments in Africa, Central Asia and Venezuela , Montalbano told OilPrice.com. The country has also sought natural gas to satisfy increasing consumption and built many liquefied natural gas receiving terminals over the last year, he added.

“Cut off from African natural resources . . . China ’s growth stops,” warned Peter Pham, director of the Africa Project at the New York-based National Committee on American Foreign Policy and an associate professor at James Madison University in Harrisonburg , Virginia .

This intensive bid for energy, however, has caused friction with the world community. Under an investment strategy in Africa, China “wins over very easily governing elites but doesn’t necessarily win over the populace,” Pham charged.

Chinese state-owned companies tend not to invest in exploration but prefer to offer “inducements,” he said. China’s offer of multibillion-dollar credit facilities to Angola was pivotal for the African nation to get “off the hook” from negotiating with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to meet “serious reform and certain conditions” before the organizations granted such facilities, he argued. China then bought stakes from the Angolan state oil company, he said.

China, moreover, has helped the Khartoum government to evade United Nations sanctions by assisting in the building of at least three weapons factories in Sudan , he said.

Not to be outdone, Russia has returned to Africa in “considerable force” pursuing natural resources in part to recover its “great power status,” said Pham. Russian firms are trying to “lock in partnerships” with resource producers to form, for example, the “stream of a natural gas OPEC,” he said.

Russia holds the world’s largest natural gas reserves and the eighth largest oil reserves, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Next year, its federal budget will be nearly 50 percent derived from oil and gas exports, emphasizing a reliance on gas exports to “feed the budget,” Montalbano of the Energy Policy Research Foundation told OilPrice.com. To some extent, China and Russia have worked together in the oil and gas domain. Earlier this year, China announced a $25-billion loan to Russian firms in return for a 20-year supply of crude oil.

Russia is not the “behemoth of financial reserves” it was two years ago and has a “fairly weak” banking system and industry, Montalbano maintained. While the country is discussing certain projects with Iran and potentially with Iraq , it is mainly concerned with opening up huge Arctic gas fields because its existing fields are declining, he noted.

Russia and other northern countries have increasingly turned to the melting Arctic but the region is “still up for delineation,” said Boyko Nitzov, director of the Eurasia Energy Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington . “The Arctic is still fairly off limits for large-scale production of oil and gas” and difficult to access especially during the winter, Nitzov explained.

For American oil companies, an over-reliance on the Middle East for energy needs has shifted its attention to Africa, a major energy supplier over the last several years edging out the Persian Gulf in energy imports to the United States , Pham explained. U.S. firms tend to forge production-sharing agreements or explore resource development, but lack carte blanche in their pursuit of oil riches in places like Africa due to U.S. government sanctions and public pressure, he said. This puts the United States at “a slight disadvantage” relative to Russia and China , he added.

Competition for energy assets will probably not lead to open conflict but rather to increasing political tension, predicted Africa expert Pham. Leading African organizations, Europe and the United States never recognized Guinea ’s military coup last year, which led to a subsequent massacre of opposition members. Yet China signed a deal with the military junta, risking a perception as a “rogue operator in the single-minded pursuit of resources,” he warned.

Although Russia and China, meanwhile, have both benefited from joint oil and gas investments, making conflict doubtful in the forseeable future, “10, 20 years down the road, who knows,” Montalbano added.

Fawzia Sheikh of OilPrice.com who focus on Fossil Fuels, Alternative Energy, Metals, and Geopolitics. To find out more visit their website at: http://www.oilprice.com

Global Research Articles by Fawzia Sheikh

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Copenhagen Consequences: What You Need To Know

by heritage.org

Fact Sheet #44

The Next Kyoto?

• U.S. Policy: In 1997 the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, which warned President Clinton not to enter into any global warming treaty that leaves out developing nations or hurts the American economy. This is still U.S. policy today and should serve as the overarching guidelines for the December global warming conference in Copenhagen.
• An Expiring Kyoto: The Kyoto Protocol is the major global warming treaty currently in place, and it expires in 2012. The Copenhagen conference has long been seen by Kyoto proponents as critical for extending the provisions into the decades ahead. 
• Kyoto Not Ratified: After Vice President Al Gore agreed to the protocol, President Clinton failed to even submit it to the Senate, knowing there wasn’t support for a treaty that so obviously violated the Byrd-Hagel Resolution.
• Massive Kyoto Costs: The U.S. didn’t ratify the Kyoto protocol for good reason. Its provisions would have been economically disastrous and environmentally inconsequential. Kyoto failed to reduce emissions, and the developing world–especially China which now out-emits the U.S.–was completely exempt. An Energy Information Administration study at the time projected costs of U.S. compliance to be between $100 billion and $397 billion annually.

Kyoto a Failure

• Increasing Emissions: As expected, emissions from exempted developing nations skyrocketed since 1997, but surprisingly, so have emissions from most developed nation signatories. Many Western European nations, and even Japan and Canada, have experienced faster emission increases than those of the U.S. The fact that the U.S. is doing better as a Kyoto outsider than many Kyoto insiders is a lesson that ought not to be lost at Copenhagen.
• An Overstated Problem: There has been little or no global warming since the Kyoto Protocol was signed, despite increasing carbon dioxide emissions.

Countdown to Copenhagen

• Developing Nations: The need to include developing nations is even greater today. Developing-world emissions began to outpace developed nations in 2005, and they are projected to continue increasing seven times faster. China’s emissions growth is projected to be nine times higher than the U.S.’s through 2030.
• Copenhagen Likely Worse Than Kyoto: As economically damaging as Kyoto would have been, Copenhagen would likely be worse. Even proponents of Kyoto described its 5% target as a modest first step toward reducing emissions. One analysis showed that Kyoto would reduce the Earth’s temperature by no more than 0.07 degrees Celsius by 2050. If participants at Copenhagen were serious, they would have to be much more economically reckless to meet their own environmental standards.
• Waxman-Markey: The U.S. domestic global warming bill, which narrowly passed the House last June, contains far more stringent targets than Kyoto, requiring a 17% reduction in emissions from 2005 baseline levels by 2020 and 83% by 2050. The Heritage Foundation’s analysis showed that this bill would easily qualify as "serious harm" to the U.S. economy, including reductions in GDP of $393 billion annually, total costs to a household of four of nearly $3,000 annually, and over 1 million net job losses.
• Copenhagen Would Cost Too Much: In order to actually reduce emissions, similarly onerous targets to those in Waxman-Markey would be necessary in any global warming treaty coming out of Copenhagen, and those would certainly violate Byrd-Hagel and yield America a desperately tragic economic future.

Copenhagen Consequences: What You Need To Know

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by KeithBroaders

The U. S. Geological Service issued a report in April (’08) that only scientists and oil men knew was coming, but man was it big.  It was a revised report (hadn’t been updated since ’95) on how much oil was in this area of the western 2/3 of North Dakota ;  western South Dakota ; and extreme eastern Montana ….. check THIS out:

The Bakken is the largest domestic oil discovery since Alaska ‘s Prudhoe Bay , and has the potential to eliminate all American dependence on foreign oil. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates it at 503 billion barrels. Even if just 10% of the oil is recoverable… at $107 a barrel, we’re looking at a resource base worth more than $5.3 trillion.

‘When I first briefed legislators on this, you could practically see their jaws hit the floor. They had no idea.’ says Terry Johnson, the Montana Legislature’s financial analyst.

‘This sizable find is now the highest-producing onshore oil field found in the past 56 years’ reports, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette.  It’s a formation known as the Williston Basin , but is more commonly referred to as the ‘Bakken.’  And it stretches from Northern Montana, through North Dakota and into Canada .  For years, U. S. oil exploration has been considered a dead end.  Even the ‘Big Oil’ companies gave up searching for major oil wells decades ago.  However, a recent technological breakthrough has opened up the Bakken’s massive reserves…. and we now have access of up to 500 billion barrels.  And because this is light, sweet oil, those billions of barrels will cost Americans just $16 PER BARREL!

That’s enough crude to fully fuel the American economy for 2041 years straight.

2. And if THAT didn’t throw you on the floor, then this next one should – because it’s from TWO YEARS AGO!

U. S. Oil Discovery- Largest Reserve in the World!
Stansberry Report Online – 4/20/2006

Hidden 1,000 feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountains lies the largest untapped oil reserve in the world. It is more than 2 TRILLION barrels.  On August 8, 2005 President Bush mandated its extraction. In three and a half years of high oil prices none has been extracted. With this motherload of oil why are we still fighting over off-shore drilling?

They reported this stunning news:  We have more oil inside our borders, than all the other proven reserves on earth. Here are the official estimates:

- 8-times as much oil as Saudi Arabia
- 18-times as much oil as Iraq
- 21-times as much oil as Kuwait
- 22-times as much oil as Iran
- 500-times as much oil as Yemen
- and it’s all right here in the Western United States .

HOW can this BE? HOW can we NOT BE extracting this?  Because the environmentalists and others have blocked all efforts to help America become independent of foreign oil! Again, we are letting a small group of people dictate our lives and our economy…..WHY?

James Bartis, lead researcher with the study says we’ve got more oil in this very compact area than the entire Middle East -more than 2 TRILLION barrels untapped.  That’s more than all the proven oil reserves of crude oil in the world today, reports The Denver Post.

Don’t think ‘OPEC’ will drop its price – even with this find?  Think again!  It’s all about the competitive marketplace, – it has to. Think OPEC just might be funding the environmentalists?
Got your attention/ire up yet?  Hope so!  Now, while you’re thinking about it …. and hopefully P.O’d, do this:

3. Pass this along.   If you don’t take a little time to do this, then you should stifle yourself the next time you want to complain about gas prices— because by doing NOTHING, you’ve forfeited your right to complain.
——–
Now I just wonder what would happen in this country if every one of you sent this to every one in your address book.
By the way…this is all true. Check it out at the link below!!!
GOOGLE it or follow this link.  It will blow your mind.
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911

http://restoretherepublic.net/article/2128/billions-of-barrels-of-oil-discovered-in-the-united-states

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