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17 June 2019

A Tanker War in the Middle East—Again?

By Robin Wright

U.S. Navy ships in the Middle East heard the first distress signal at 6:12 a.m. Thursday. The Kokuka Courageous, a tanker owned by Japan and bound from Saudi Arabia to Singapore, had been damaged by an explosive device. A fire raged in its engine room. The crew was abandoning ship. A second distress signal came in at 7 a.m. The Front Altair, a Norwegian-owned tanker bound from the United Arab Emirates to Taiwan, had also been hit. It, too, was ablaze. The fallout was fast—and furious. Within hours, oil prices rose four per cent. The U.S. Navy went to provide aid and investigate the attacks. The U.N. Security Council called for immediate consultations to prevent yet another Middle East conflict. Two tanker companies suspended new bookings to the oil-producing states in the Persian Gulf. And, amid already escalating tensions between the United States and Iran, the blame game began.

In Washington, the Trump Administration charged that Iran was responsible for the two attacks on Thursday, and also attacks on four other tankers, on May 12th. All six ships were struck in the Gulf of Oman, the body of water between Oman and Iran, just beyond the Strait of Hormuz. “This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping, and the fact that no proxy group operating in the area has the resources and proficiency to act with such a high degree of sophistication,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters at the State Department.

The Administration provided no specific intelligence about why it believed that Iran was responsible for Thursday’s incidents or the attacks in May. On Thursday, the U.S. reportedly spotted an unexploded limpet mine near one of the stricken ships. Both tankers were hit “at or below the waterline, in close proximity to the engine room while underway,” the International Association of Independent Tanker Owners reported. “These appeared to be well-planned and coordinated.”

In Tehran, the Islamic Republic denied responsibility. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted, “Suspicious doesn’t begin to describe what likely transpired this morning.” He noted that the attacks on a Japanese-owned tanker occurred while Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was meeting with Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “for extensive and friendly talks.” Abe had made the first visit by a Japanese Prime Minister since the 1979 Revolution, to carry a message from President Trump, who visited Tokyo last month. Zarif added, “Iran’s proposed Regional Dialogue Forum is imperative” to defuse tensions between the Islamic Republic and the Gulf sheikhdoms.

Some experts suggested that both countries share some blame, with the world shouldering the costs. “If Iran is the culprit, the Trump Administration has only itself to blame for pushing Tehran to take aggressive steps that it has eschewed since the worst days of the Iran-Iraq War,” Ali Vaez, the director of the International Crisis Group’s Iran program, told me. “If Iran wasn’t behind it, it’s being framed by those who want to see a war between Iran and the U.S.” Rising tensions in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, he added, “are bound to increase the risk premium on global energy prices.”

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is fretting. “We are just about as close to a conflict without there being an actual armed conflict, so the tensions are very high,” Jakob P. Larsen, the head of maritime security for the bimco shipping-group association, told the Associated Press. bimco represents about sixty per cent of the world’s merchant fleet, including the owners of the two tankers that were damaged on Thursday. Roughly a third of the world’s seaborne oil trade goes through the Strait of Hormuz.

European governments issued urgent warnings about the dangers of conflict in the Gulf region. Germany, one of the biggest proponents of the 2015 nuclear-nonproliferation deal, called the incident “extremely worrying.” But Russia cautioned against leaping to attach blame. “Lately we have been seeing a strengthening campaign of political, psychological, and military pressure on Iran. We wouldn’t want the events that have just happened, which are tragic and shook the world oil market, to be used speculatively to further aggravate the situation in an anti-Iranian sense,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said.

But the Trump Administration charged that Thursday’s twin tanker attacks reflect a broader pattern of recent provocations by Iran that “should be understood in the context of forty years of unprovoked aggression against freedom-loving nations,” Pompeo said. On April 22nd, the Islamic Republic pledged that it would interrupt the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz if Washington’s “maximum-pressure campaign” blocked all Iranian exports. “It is now working to execute on that promise,” Pompeo said. In May, the Revolutionary Guards attempted to deploy dhows capable of launching missiles. Tehran was also tied, through a proxy militia in Yemen, to an attack, on May 14th, on two strategic oil pipelines in Saudi Arabia and a missile strike, on Wednesday, on the arrivals terminal of the kingdom’s Abha International Airport, Pompeo claimed. Twenty-six people were injured in the airport strike. The Administration has also alleged that Iran, through its allies, was connected to a rocket that landed near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on May 19th and a car bomb in Afghanistan on May 31st that wounded four U.S. service members.

“Taken as a whole, these unprovoked attacks present a clear threat to international peace and security, a blatant assault on the freedom of navigation, and an unacceptable campaign of escalating tension by Iran,” Pompeo said.

Tensions in the Gulf are an eerie echo of the tanker war that erupted in the late eighties during the eight-year conflict between Iraq and Iran. The tanker war was launched in 1984, when Iraq attacked Iran’s oil terminal and oil tankers at Kharg Island, in the northern Persian Gulf. Iran responded by striking tankers—initially from Kuwait and later from other nations—that ferried Iraqi oil. In 1987, as the tanker war threatened to disrupt global oil supplies, the Reagan Administration intervened. It re-registered Kuwaiti ships under the American flag, which allowed the U.S. Navy to provide military protection. Operation Earnest Will became the largest U.S. naval convoy operation since the Second World War. It included carrier battle groups from the Navy, Air Force awacssurveillance planes, and U.S. Army Special Operations Forces. At one point, some thirty ships were deployed to escort tankers from the volatile Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.

The U.S. intervention to protect tankers also led to direct military action with Iran. In September, 1987, U.S. aircraft spotted the Iran Ajr pushing mines into Gulf waters. Helicopter gunships opened fire. By the time the attack was over, four Iranian sailors were dead, the rest of the crew had abandoned ship (and were picked up by the U.S. Navy), and the ship was scuttled.

The timing of the U.S. attack was particularly painful for Iran. Khamenei, who was then Iran’s President, was in New York for the U.N. General Assembly—the first visit by a top revolutionary leader since the 1979 upheaval that overthrew the shah. His trip followed the first covert contacts between Washington and Tehran in what became known as the arms-for-hostage swap during the Reagan Administration. In 1986, top White House officials led a secret mission to Iran. Although that diplomacy collapsed, Khamenei’s trip in 1987 was designed to signal Tehran’s willingness to engage with the world. Instead, the visit was overtaken by Iran’s mining misadventure.

“It was a peaceful merchant ship,” the Iranian President insisted, at a breakfast that I attended with a small group of journalists. “This is the beginning of a series of events, the bitter consequences of which will not be restricted to the Persian Gulf. The U.S. shall receive a proper response for this abominable act. Today, it is we who receive the dead bodies of our sons. But if, God forbid, the day comes when you will receive the dead bodies of your sons, people will say, ‘Why didn’t you stop it?’ ”

Over the years, Iranian officials have repeatedly told me that the humiliating experience in New York was formative to Khamenei’s thinking about the United States. He has long held that the U.S. attack on the Iran Ajr was designed to undermine his U.N. speech—and him personally. Two years later, Khamenei was selected as the Islamic Republic’s second Supreme Leader, a position he has held for three decades. He has frequently said at public events that the United States can’t be trusted, and he said it again after his meeting with Abe on Thursday. “You said Mr. @abeshinzo, that Trump has said negotiations with the U.S. would lead to Iran’s progress,” the Supreme Leader tweeted on his English-language account. “By the Grace of God, without negotiations & despite sanctions, we will progress.”

In an ominous sign for the prospects of diplomacy deëscalating the Gulf crisis anytime soon, Trump responded with his own tweet. “While I very much appreciate P.M. Abe going to Iran to meet Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, I personally feel that it is too soon to even think about making a deal,” he wrote. “They are not ready, and neither are we.”

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