I don’t believe you’d like it
You wouldn’t like it here
There ain’t no entertainment
And the judgements are severe
The Maestro says it’s Mozart
But it sounds like bubble gum
When you’re waiting
For the miracle, for the miracle to come
Leonard Cohen: Waiting for the miracle
Apropos my post three days ago – Why can’t the US make … weapons? – see this abridged excerpt from footnote 3 of Yves Smith’s Naked Capitalism post today on the Iran war …
In July the US Army awarded Lockheed Martin a $53.9bn PAC-3 contract to lift annual output from 600 missiles to 2,000 by 2030; one of the largest missile-production commitments ever.
Problem: the PAC-3’s guidance system uses two rare-earths whose supply is controlled by China.
The Iran war is an air-defense war, ruinously expensive in interceptors. The guidance head to track and close on an incoming warhead relies on samarium-cobalt (SmCo) magnets. SmCo focuses the microwave beam in the traveling-wave tubes of the Patriot’s ground radar. And the radar’s phase shifters, which steer the beam across the sky, are tuned with yttrium.
On both samarium and yttrium, China’s grip is close to total …
… and this from paragraph four of the main text …
… Washington Post reports that Trump exited the NATO summit in Ankara not on either of his Air Force 1 planes but another military jet after being covertly transported there on a catering truck. This in stark contrast with Iran’s [murdered] Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei rejecting entreaties that he work out of a bunker rather than his office. He refused protection not available to ordinary Iranians, whereas Trump’s plane switch, based on his belief in an assassination threat, put staffers and reporters in harm’s way by having them take the decoy plane.
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As ever, today’s report on Washington’s sociopathic war is long on detail, with a soupçon of hearsay, a modicum of reasoned guesswork, and the distinctions clearly flagged.
Iran War: Iran, Ansar Allah Keep Up Attacks on Ships as Trump Insists He Controls Strait of Hormuz, Will Break Iran Economically; Press Highlights Trump Cowardice in Catering Truck Escape From Ankara
Again, limited kinetic action and relentless Trump and Administration puffery masks that Trump has no way out of his Iran disaster save an ugly exit, a formal capitulation, or blowing up more stuff in Iran and having Iran destroy the global economy. But the press keeps unquestioningly parroting hopium and Administration/hawk derangement. Oil experts who also called the energy crunch early are citing more evidence of its inevitable arrival, even if it might not be as dramatic as the much-touted “cliff”.
As we and many others reported, Iran has drawn very hard red lines, adding US withdrawal from the Middle East and an end to hostilities on all fronts, including Lebanon, Gaza, and now Yemen, and insisting that MOU requirements, like the return of frozen assets and sanctions relief, happen up front. The new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, has surfaced and even met with President Pezeshkian for over seven hours. He also appointed a new, very hardline secretary, Mohsen Rezaei,1 to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council.
Iran has also named six new military commanders. Commentators see the significance is that Iran naming them, as in exposing to assassination attempts, signals that Iran believes it has sufficiently tightened its security.
And two prurient interest stories: one of the Washington Post reporting that Trump exited the NATO summit in Ankara not on either of his Air Force 1 planes but via another military jet after being covertly transported their on a catering truck. This move stands in stark contrast with Iran’s former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei rejecting entreaties that he work out of a bunker rather than his office. He was not willing to take advantage of protection not available to ordinary Iranian. By contrast, Trump’s plane switch caper, based on his belief in an assassination threat, meant he was putting staffers and reporters in hare’s way by having them ride in the decoy plane.
Second is a report on Tasnim of a violent fight on the Abraham Lincoln that resulted in seven deaths. While this may seem not credible to Americans, it’s an interesting piece of information warfare, since tales of terrible food and speculation on whether the Gerald Ford laundry fire was sabotage have gotten lots of coverage abroad in addition to at home.
We’ll soon give a bit more detail, including on that attacks on vessels. But we wanted to raise a broader question: many experts, such as Joe Kent, have argued that Trump should “just leave”. But what does that amount to in practice? Keep in mind that Iran has made clear it has a vote and we’ll see it really does.
Also keep in mind that the newly-elevated Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council has set forth Iran’s key demands for opening the Strait of Hormuz. This list is no surprise to those who have been paying attentions, since it is consistent with recent remarks by other officials and informal spokesman like Professor Mohammed Marandi. From Press TV:
Mohsen Rezaei, the newly appointed head of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), told Chinese Ambassador to Tehran Zong Piyu in a Tuesday meeting that the US must end the war on Iran and its regional allies and release Iran’s blocked funds for a full reopening of the Strait of Hormuz…
He said Iran has also communicated some other conditions to the US through intermediaries that have been involved in indirect negotiations between the two sides in the past weeks.
Rezaei reiterated that if Iran and Oman, the other littoral state in the Strait of Hormuz, reach an agreement on the transit routes in the waterway, that agreement will have no impact on Iran’s decision to close or reopen the strait.
Superficially, this looks like a retreat from some other demands Iranian officials have indicated, which some have summarized as MOU plus: a return to the MOU, with Iran’s frozen funds released and sanctions relief up front, an end to hostilities on all fronts, and an exit from US bases. But given that the story includes ”Iran has also communicated some other conditions”, this list above is partial. So it looks as if Rezaei soft-pedaled Iran’s position in his meeting with the Chinese emissary.
A thin-form unilateral exit would mean ending the blockade and pulling out all the extra manpower, like the Special Forces, that had been deployed to the theater. But it will leave the economic war on so as to continue to punish Iran for its sin of not capitulating to the US and still having a nuclear weapons program.
Readers no doubt can improve on this picture, so consider this discussion to be what consultants call a forcing device. We will greatly simplify the problem by assuming that (again following Joe Kent) that the Administration has firmly and credibly told Israel that it is on its own if it tries to escalate with Iran.2
But the US would still be scheming with Israel to rearm and have a go at Iran as soon as possible.3 The sanctions stay on. Iran gets no frozen assets back. The US is still in Israel and maybe has a toehold in Jordan and other bases.
However, dropping the blockade and de-escalating by removal of extra forces should be a wake-up call to the Gulf States. Would they come to a modus vivendi with Iran (and Oman) and agree to Iran’s oversight and fee regime? Iran would insist they pay reparations. What about the $6 billion in frozen funds sitting in Qatar, agreed to be released under Biden, where the Trump Administration ostentatiously jerked around Iran by saying the Biden deal put restrictions on how the funds would be used (IIRC really vague ones, as in not for military purposes) and then made demands Iran would not accept.4
So it does not seem that progress towards a separate peace of sorts with petrostates could come about all that quickly, even with some, perhaps most, coming to accept that Iran will indeed control the Strait of Hormuz. From The Hormuz Report:
Gulf energy producers have completely lost faith in the Trump administration and are quietly accepting Iran’s permanent control over the Strait of Hormuz — because the alternative, returning to war, would be worse, per WSJ.
Gulf states don’t like the emerging deal that formalizes Iranian oversight of inbound ships. But they see it as “the least-bad option” compared to further military escalation, which would put their energy infrastructure at risk. The conflict has left the region — vital to global energy security — with no good option for countering Iran.
The numbers are stark. Crude exports through the Strait have collapsed to 2.2 million barrels per day from 8.5 million a month ago. Pre-war flows of roughly 20 million barrels per day are now a distant memory. Gulf states’ alternative export routes are also under attack — Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea pipeline hit by Houthi strikes, Egypt’s Damietta port struck by drones.
Iranian officials have declared the new Iranian order in the Strait is “irreversible,” and the U.S. has no alternative but to accept it or face “costs much greater than in the past.” Iran already holds effective control over the strait, with commercial shippers refusing to cross without Tehran’s assurance.
The WSJ’s conclusion is stark: Gulf states are adapting to a new normal where Iran’s veto over their energy exports is permanent. The U.S. has been pushed out of the Gulf militarily. And the alternative to accepting Iran’s control — a return to full-scale war — is worse.
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Nevertheless, they seem likely to gag on terms Iran is insisting on now: the ouster of the US and some sort of reparations. The fact that the Gulf states are changing their minds does not mean they have changed their hearts. So odds favor that Strait of Hormuz remains choked as they wrangle with Iran over terms. And will the Saudis get over themselves and make adequate concessions to Ansar Allah to stop the blockade on Saudi transits of the Red Sea?
In the mean time, if the sanctions are still on and the US is still in possession of Iran’s frozen assets, it seems likely that Iran will keep shooting at every US military and dual-use asset in range of its missiles and drones. This would seem to mean Iran starts destroying more intel and surveillance assets like data centers (if Iran could find a big above-ground telecom switch, taking that out could be comparably nasty to cutting cables) and would seem to lead to Iran attacking Israel installations, both IDF and US assets.
In other words, I don’t see a viable exit strategy, or at least one that is an actual exit, as opposed to a de-escalation. And the world economy remains hostage 5 …
Continue at Naked Capitalism …
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