By Michael Karadjis

So let’s get this straight: after 3 weeks of horrific bombing of Iran, killing off its top leadership, hundreds of schoolgirls, bombing oil storage facilities and gasfields, tearing apart the region and smashing the world economy, among the results are:

1. Iran is so in control of the Straits of Hormuz that it has “created a de facto ‘safe’ shipping corridor through its territorial waters in the Strait of Hormuz, offering vetted vessels passage in exchange for approval” and payment of up to $2 million per vessel

2. The US has “temporarily” unsanctioned Iranian oil and is “allowing” it to traverse the straits and export in order to reduce the impact on world oil prices

3. The US has also “temporarily” unsanctioned Russian oil, likewise to reduce the impact on world oil prices – but since this extra Iranian and Russian oil is not that much in relation to the current v\blocking of some 20 percent of world oil exports, Russia (and Iran) is profiting from the sky-high oil prices.

Of course, I don’t want to sound flippant about this: Iran has been smashed to bits and some 2000 killed by the US and Israel in their criminal war. Nevertheless, strategically speaking, this is what the situation looks like to me (what I call “winning” and “losing” are of course very relative terms and not so simple in any of these cases):

• 

  Strait of Hormuz

  Winning: Israel, Iran, Russia.

• Losing: The US, Gulf Arab states, Lebanon, world economy
• Sitting pretty: China – yes, impacted by high oil prices, but cushioned by its enormous strategic reserves, while watching its US rival led by an idiot get itself sucked into a quagmire.

Trump obviously wants and needs out, but cannot exit in a way that looks like a humiliating withdrawal from total chaos created by his own actions; he needs to show a “victory.” Yes, he could claim a victory in terms of the degree to which Iran’s ballistic missile capacity, launchers and production facilities have been degraded, its air defence and navy smashed, and nuclear industry – which eh claimed had been “totally obliterated” in the 12-day war last June – further degraded. But that doesn’t look much like a victory if you quit at a moment when Iran is blocking one fifth of the world’s oil exports by holding the Straits and still being able to send (a smaller number of, but nevertheless deadly) missiles and drones all over the Gulf and to Israel.

After all, the Iranian leadership’s own calculations are somewhat similar, if obviously more just as the nation under attack. That is, it needs to demonstrate “victory.” So although it is under horrific attack, it claims to have rejected proposals for ceasefire and negotiations by the US (whereas the US claims to have rejected proposals for ceasefire and negotiations from Iran!). In other words, it won’t stop blocking the Straits and attacking Israel and perhaps elsewhere even if they stop unless its own demands are met, including reparations and the end of sanctions. While there is obviously a certain amount of bluster in that, it is similar tot he US stance in that both need to show some kind of political victory.

Israel, of course, doesn’t care – it’s aim was and is to blow the region to bits, to create chaos and upheaval, for state collapse in Iran, to set Iran and Arabs against each other and blow up their now multi-year detente, to create conditions to complete the genocide in Gaza, the destruction of the West Bank and the advance of Greater Israel, which is now busy creating in Lebanon, and on a smaller scale, in Syria.

None of that is Trump’s aim at all. But as his rather stupid-headed aims to “doing a Venezuela” on Iran, finding a more “pragmatic” wing of the Revolutionary Guard to keep in power while their vast economic empire were guaranteed, and it taking a week or so, were blown to bits at the outset, when Israel killed the leaders he thought he was going to negotiate with along with Khamenei, and kept killing, even killing Larijani (who Israel “planned to tell the US about” later and eventually Trump found out in the pages of the WSJ), bombing Iran’s South Pars gasfield which it shares with Qatar (so that Trump was forced to distance himself from Israel on that and state – or pretend – he knew nothing about it), with the result that now we have Khamenei’s son in power, which word has it is harder line than his father (and if Trump and Israel had just killed my father, mother, wife, one of my children etc, I reckon I’d be pretty “hard-line” as well), and so on.

A desperate maniac like Trump is likely to do desperate things. I’m not sure that either of the “special operations” talked about that could have a dramatic enough effect to really hurt Iran and thus allow Trump to proclaim “victory” and leave with an action looking big, tough, short and brutally effective – namely seizing Kharg Island, or sending in commandos to take out Iran’s stores of already enriched uranium – have any reality to them whatsoever. Nor, on the other hand, do I think Trump will go nuclear – he’s mad, but not that much, and he still has some semi-rational people around him (I obviously don’t mean his Naziesque War Minister).

But I do take extremely serious his latest threat to destroy all of Iran’s power plants if it doesn’t free up the Straits – to which Iran has threatened to respond in the Gulf. That would be a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.

From this Lloydslist article:

Iran has created a de facto ‘safe’ shipping corridor through its territorial waters in the Strait of Hormuz, offering vetted vessels passage in exchange for approval — and in at least one case, a reported $2m payment

At least one tanker operator is understood to have paid a fee to Iran to transit the Strait of Hormuz while several other tankers have passed following Iranian vetting and diplomatic interventions, according to several well-placed sources with direct knowledge of the transits.

Multiple governments including India, Pakistan, Iraq, Malaysia and China are all understood to be discussing vessel transit plans directly with Tehran, where officials within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have established a nascent ship registration system for “approved” vessels to agree safe passage.

At least nine ships have now exited the strait via the “safe” corridor that routes ships through Iranian territorial waters via Iran’s Larak Island, which is used by the IRGC Navy and port authority to assess visual confirmation of the vessels.

Lloyd’s List has been unable to establish whether any payments were made in each of the nine cases.

Only one tanker is so far understood to have made a payment, said to be in the region of $2m, as part of an agreement to transit the strait.

It remains unclear how the transaction was made given extensive sanctions in place against Iran.

While use of the Iranian corridor is currently being negotiated on a case-by-case basis, Lloyd’s List understands that the IRGC is expected to establish a more formalised vessel approval process in the coming days.

Our comment: We thank Michael Karadjis for his permission to reprint these comments. One thing of which we are not so sure is whether Trump might use nuclear weapons. Military commanders in the region have been reported telling their troops that this is god’s war and it’s part of coming end times. Previously, Pete Hegseth had told a group of evangelicals, with whom he is close, “there’s a direct through line from the Old and New Testament Christian gospels to the development of Western civilization and the United States of America,” and he is known to defend the Crusades. This fits perfectly with the “end times” fantasy, which would justify using nuclear weapons. An equivalent step in that direction would be to bomb Iran’s Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant. That would have an equally devastating consequences as far as spreading nuclear radiation. It seems unimaginable that any administration would even consider using a nuclear weapon, but then aren’t we in a situation that was unimaginable just a few years ago?

Coming next: First in a four part series on Kurdistan and world revolution. We urge those of our readers who have not done so already to take out a free subscription in order to be sure to get the articles on this important subject.