The so-called "incident" that took place in the Strait of Hormuz is deeply alarming if understood in context, writes Mustafa El-Labbad When Washington announced that five Iranian naval crafts had "harassed" and "threatened" three American ships near the Strait of Hormuz the world held its breath. Would the American ships open fire? Was this the awaited prelude to war? Tehran quickly tried to allay such fears. It was all just a routine interception that ended once the two sides identified each other, Iranian officials claimed. Nevertheless, there was nothing routine about the timing of this "naval incident", coinciding as it did with Bush's Middle East tour. Indeed, one suspects that it was deliberately staged with the purpose of rallying regional and international support behind the Bush administration's ongoing campaign against Iran, which, after all, is one of the purposes of this tour. Another rather ominous "coincidence" is that all Republican presidential nominees, with the exception of Matt Romney, have declared they would support a military strike against Iran if Iranian ships tried to threaten American ships in the Gulf again. The 600-mile long Strait of Hormuz, the scene of this "confrontation," is the most economically and strategically important chokepoint in the world. Through this narrow passageway, which separates the Arabian Peninsula from Iran, the Gulf's enormous petroleum wealth must pass before it can breathe more easily again in the open international maritime routes of the Indian Ocean. If the southern shores of the Gulf are owned by Arab countries, its northern shores, from tip to tip, are fully controlled by Iran. Iran, moreover, dominates the Strait of Hormuz from its vantage points at Qeshm Island, its ports at Bandar-e Lengeh and Bandar-e Abbas, the three strategically located islands -- Tunab Major, Tunab Minor and Abu Moussa -- the Persian ownership of which is contested by the United Arab Emirates. About 40 per cent of the world's petroleum resources pass through the Strait of Hormuz, at the rate of 17 million barrels a day, according to estimates for 2008. If anything, the importance of this bottleneck of the Gulf will only increase in coming years in light of predictions that region's oil production will rise to 28.3 million barrels per day by 2010 and 31.1 million barrels per day by 2020. There are two sea-lanes in this 34-mile wide maritime passageway, one for incoming and the other for outgoing traffic. They are separated by only two miles. If a couple of middle-sized tankers sank in either one of these sea lanes, navigation and, hence, the flow of oil to world markets would be obstructed for two weeks and oil prices would skyrocket as never before. The US has a history with naval "incidents" of the sort that just happened in the Gulf. If that history is anything to go by, it is not very reassuring. On 1 August 1964, president Lyndon Johnson issued orders to retaliate against North Vietnamese gunboats in the Bay of Tonkin. These "hostile ships", the American president told his people, "attacked American warships that were on routine missions in the Bay of Tonkin". On 4 August, Johnson declared war against North Vietnam on the basis of the Bay of Tonkin incident, which American military historians suggest never even occurred. It does not require a great deal of imagination to picture a similar scenario in the Strait of Hormuz: the commander of an American warship orders his crew to open fire against an Iranian vessel in retaliation for an allegedly hostile action, after which reports of the incident are relayed to the top US military brass, then to the secretary of defence and the Oval Office, and before you know it, the White House sounds the clarions of a war for which it had been preparing for a long time. In many ways the Strait of Hormuz incident epitomises the current precariousness of that strategic site. If it sent out one message loud and clear it was that the Bush administration is still set on escalating tensions with Iran and that this administration is not about to make any deals with Tehran at the expense of other issues. Of course, such posing is part and parcel of the way nations conduct their international relations. Nor is there anything new or unexpected in the pugnacity of the Bush administration's message. What is disturbing, however, is the mailbox from which it was posted: the world's most important petroleum pipeline and its most sensitive strategic chokepoint.
