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Iran’s Hormuz plans raise familiar concerns

Members of the Iranian regime have raised the specter of closing the Strait of Hormuz, the critical choke point through which roughly 30 percent of the world’s petroleum and natural gas is shipped.

On Dec. 12, a member of the Iranian parliament told an Iranian news agency that the navy would hold a drill to practice closing the strait.

“The drill is one of the responses of the Islamic Republic of Iran to foreign threats,” the lawmaker, Parviz Sarvari, was quoted as saying.

Although a regime spokesman later backed away from saying the drill would close the strait, a Dec. 14 editorial from a hard-line newspaper aligned with the supreme leader asserted that Iran is “entitled and able to close the strait.”

The issue came up at a Republican primary debate Dec. 15. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich cited the drill as evidence the U.S. is “vulnerable” to Iran.

Iranian saber-rattling about closing the strait is nothing new, one analyst said, but is getting more attention after the U.S. and other Western nations ratcheted up sanctions in the wake of a November report from the International Atomic Energy Agency that found the Iranians may be building nuclear weapons.

“It happens several times a year,” Michael Connell, director of Iranian studies at the Center for Naval Analyses, said of Iranian threats to close the strait. “I think what’s happening right now is that more people are focusing on it because tensions are running very high.”

At only 29 miles wide at its narrowest point, the strait is vulnerable to Iranian closure, a strategy the Iranians could employ with submarines, mines, anti-ship cruise missiles and small boats, as well as from their fortified islands, Connell said, adding that the Iranian navy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps practice this several times a year.

“They could actually close the strait,” Connell said. “They could make it too dangerous for commercial shipping to move through.”

But since mining the strait and provoking war would also devastate Iran’s oil-dependent economy, it’s an open question whether Iran would ever do this.

“They would be committing economic suicide if they did do this,” Connell said.