No Hormuzwont follow through on threats Boot 2012 *Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at CFR, **chief

f of staff to U.S. Navy Central

Command/Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (1/4, Bradley, CFR, Iran Won't Close the Strait of Hormuz, http://www.cfr.org/iran/iran-wont-close-strait-hormuz/p26960?cid=rss-middleeast-iran_won_t_close_the_strait_of010412&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+region%2Fmiddle_east+%28CFR.org++Regions+-+Middle+East%29&utm_content=Google+Reader)

A2 Hormuz

Despite the unveiling of a new antiship cruise missile called the Qader, Iran's conventional naval and air forceson display during the Veleyat 90 naval exercises in the Persian Gulf which ended Monday are still no match for the U.S. and its allies in the region. The U.S. alone has in the area two carrier strike groups, an expeditionary strike force (centered around an amphibious assault ship that is in essence a small aircraft carrier), and numerous land-based aircraft at bases such as Al Udied in Qatar, Al Dafra in the United Arab Emirates, and Isa Air Base in Bahrain. The U.S. and our Arab allies (which are equipped with a growing array of modern American-made equipment such as F-15s and F-16s) could use overwhelming force to destroy Iran's conventional naval forces in very short order. Iran's real ability to disrupt the flow of oil lies in its asymmetric war-fighting capacity. Iran has thousands of mines(and any ship that can carry a mine is by definition a mine-layer), a small number of midget submarines, thousands of small watercraft that could be used in swarm attacks, and antiship cruise missiles. If the Iranians lay mines, it will take a significant amount of time to clear them. It took several months to clear all mines after the Tanker War, but a much shorter period to clear safe passages through the Persian Gulf to and from oil shipping terminals. Antiship cruise missiles are mobile, yet those can also be found and destroyed. Yono submarines are short-duration threatsthey eventually have to come to port for resupply, and when they do they will be sitting ducks. U.S. forces may take losses, as they did with the hits on the USS Stark and Samuel B. Roberts, but they will prevail and in fairly short order. The Iranians must realize that the balance of forces does not lie in their favor. By initiating hostilities they risk American retaliation against their most prized assetstheir covert nuclearweapons program. The odds are good, then, that the Iranians will not follow through on their saber-rattling threats. Reject evidence that fails to distinguish this from posturing Ellerman 2012 Senior Fellow for Regional Security Cooperation, International Institute for Strategic Studies (1/5, Michael, interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, CFR, How Serious Are Iran's Threats?, http://www.cfr.org/iran/serious-irans-threats/p26972?cid=rss-middleeasthow_serious_are_iran_s_threats010512&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+region %2Fmiddle_east+%28CFR.org+-+Regions+-+Middle+East %29&utm_content=Google+Reader) Simultaneous with an Iranian naval exercise in and around the Strait of Hormuz, there has been considerable bluster from the Iranian side telling the United States not to send any more warships into that area. What's going on? Is there real tension in the area or is this routine polemics? Iran has been making similar types of threats for some time. Two or three times a year they carry out different types of military exercises. In November last year, they did an air defense exercise where they claimed they could protect the country from any enemy action from the air. And then in June they had a huge exercise where they featured their ballistic missile capabilities. While this was done to try to signal to others that they have a deterrent capacity, and that they could inflict unacceptable harm on anyone thinking about attacking them, this also served

domestic politics within Iran. The UN and Western sanctions are really beginning to bite. The Iranian currency has nose-dived relative to the dollar recently. The leadership believes the bluster might help them on the domestic front. But in general, right now Iran is trying to convince others that it has a deterrent capacity and one element of that is its claim that it could close the Strait of Hormuz, which would be very costly economically to Iran. Is this connected to talk in the West of blocking Iranian oil exports? I don't think that has been expressly threatened by anyone in particular but Iran fears that that might come to pass and as a result the Iranians are trying to make the argument that "well if you are not going to allow people to buy our oil then we are not going to let any oil go through the Strait of Hormuz." Of course that begs the question, could they really close the strait? And my understanding and talking to a lot of naval experts is that no, they could not close the strait. They could make it more costly to transit the strait and insurance costs would rise tremendously. They could hassle some of the shipping, but that would be an escalation that I'm not sure they are really willing to risk at this point No impact on oil prices Faucon 12/28/11 Benoit Faucon, WSJ, 12/28/11, Strait of Hormuz Closure May Not Be Oils Doomsday, blogs.wsj.com/dispatch/2011/12/28/strait-of-hormuz-closure-may-not-be-oils-doomsday/ Back in the summer of 2008, a reported Israeli threat to bomb Iran triggered an oil-price jump to an all-time high of $147 a barrel. Now crude markets are rattled again by repeated warnings by Tehran that it could block the Strait of Hormuza narrow corridor through which one-third of the worlds seaborne oil exports transitsin case sanctions escalate into a de facto embargo. Yet, even such a scenario may not end up with the doomsday climax it may appear at first blushas there would be plenty of ways to mitigate it. For idle oil traders, toying with oil-supply disruptions in the Persian Gulf has turned into a favorite pastime during numb holiday periodsa bit like watching characters playing ping pong with cannon balls in a Looney Tunes cartoon. A recent report alleging Iran is building nuclear weapons has led to speculation the fuse could soon be liteither by a preemptive Iranian blockade of the strait or an airstrike by the U.S. or Israel. With the euro zone seemingly on the brink, most oil consumers dont find the prospect amusing. But even if one assumes such a scenario were to materialize, it may not be the disaster movie oil markets expect. For one, Gulf oils stakeholders have gone through similar turmoil beforeand they have now developed an impressive toolbox to cope with the risk. For instance, the called tanker war between Iran and Iraq led the U.S. to protect third-party oil vessels and, wary of further unrest, Washington has since heavily expanded its naval presence in the region. Iran doesnt have the firepower to match and that may limit its chances to close the strait. Tehran may only be able to block the strait for a short period, according to Kevin Liu, a director at U.K. risk consultancy Exclusive Analysis. Iran has the capability to disrupt shipping in the strait for up to a few weeks but its relative military weakness means it could not block traffic indefinitely, he wrote in a recent report. Neither is the strait the only way to ship oil from the Gulf. Arab sheikdoms could still divert some of their crude through onshore pipelines going to the Red Sea or Oman. Releases from strategic stockpilesset up after an earlier disruption due to a 1973 embargo also emanating from the Gulfcould also act as a buffer. Finally, Iran itself has sounded conflicting noises, which suggest it would not sustain such a blockade for long. Contrary to hard-liners, officials in the oil industrywhich prides itself

on being reliable even in the dark days of the war with Iraqhave ruled out a voluntary interruption of supplies. And even the countrys Arab neighbors say it would be against the Islamic republics own interests to interrupt its oil exports. So once the confetti and laces clear up, the straits own red herring may deflate like a zeppelinas fast as it was pumped up. If the Revolutionary Guards were ever to trade in oil futures, I would advise them to buy short and sell long. Iran wont and cant close the Strait Singh, 1/3/2012 Michael Singh is managing director of The Washington Institute, 1/3/12, The Real Iranian Threat in the Gulf , www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC06.php?CID=1789 Iran's bellicose rhetoric and Gulf wargames in recent days have given rise to the question of whether Tehran could close the Strait of Hormuz. As many analysts have observed, the answer is no -- not for a meaningful period of time. Less frequently addressed, however, is whether Iran would even try. The answer to that question is also "no" -- even the attempt would have devastating strategic consequences for Iran. The presumable target of an Iranian effort to close the Strait would be the United States. However, while we would of course be affected by any resulting rise in global oil prices, the U.S. gets little of our petroleum from the Gulf. The U.S. imports only about 49 percent of the petroleum we consume, and over half of those imports come from the Western Hemisphere. Less than 25 percent of U.S. imports came from all the Gulf countries combined in October 2011 -- far less than is available in the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, were Gulf supplies to be interrupted. China, on the other hand, would find its oil supplies significantly threatened by an Iranian move against the Strait. China's most significant oil supplier is Saudi Arabia. China also happens, however, to be Iran's primary oil customer and perhaps its most important ally: Beijing provides Iran with its most sophisticated weaponry and with diplomatic cover at the United Nations. Thus a move to close the Strait would backfire strategically by harming the interests of -- and likely alienating -- Iran's most important patron and cutting off Iran's own economic lifeline, while doing little to imperil U.S. supplies of crude. It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that China quickly dispatched Vice Foreign Minister Zhai Jun to Tehran in the wake of Iran's bellicose statements. In typically opaque fashion, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said only that "China hopes that peace and stability can be maintained in the Strait"; this is essentially diplo-speak for "Cool it." Even if Iran ignored these considerations and proceeded with an effort to close the Strait, the U.S. and others would move to keep it open, and would be unlikely to stop there. As Iran has crept closer to a nuclear weapons capability, the possibility of military action against Iran has also become more imminent. President Obama has been reluctant to threaten Iran militarily, and any U.S. president would think long and hard before engaging in another armed conflict in the Middle East. An effort by Iran to shut down the oil trade in the Gulf, however, would make such a decision straightforward. The U.S. would react with force, and once engaged in hostilities with Iran, would likely take the opportunity to target Iran's nuclear facilities and other military targets. It is difficult to envision any scenario beginning with an Iranian effort to close the Strait of Hormuz that does not end in a serious strategic setback for the Iranian regime. Disincentives outweigh for Strait closure

Phillips, 1/5/12 [ Iranian Threats Reflect Intensifying Confrontation over Its Nuclear Program, James, Senior Research Fellow
for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, http://blog.heritage.org/2012/01/05/iranian-threats-reflect-intensifying-confrontation-over-its-nuclear-program/]

But Iran has no real interest in actually closing the straits so long as its own oil continues to flow, because it would be one of the biggest losers. Almost all of its oil exports need to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, while Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait have access to oil pipelines that bypass that chokepoint. The United Arab Emirates soon will finish a pipeline that will allow it to export its oil through a port on the Arabian Sea. Iran making good on its threat would also result in a military clash with the U.S. that would threaten its own economy and perhaps the survival of the regime. Moreover, the U.S. and its European allies have reduced their dependence on Persian Gulf oil, most of which flows to Asian marketsespecially China, one of Irans few allies. To the extent that Iran succeeded in blocking the strait for more than a few days, it would pose a greater threat to Chinas energy security than that of the U.S., which could mitigate oil supply shortfalls by releasing oil from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve.