Quote:
Originally Posted by Firebot
This means several extremely crucial things
USA is clearly planning to take over Iran's oil infrastructure for itself (or at the very minimum completely severing Iran out of its oil export ability)
It's also the perfect location to plan a ground invasion of Iran and makes a ground invasion almost inevitable at this point (especially if the intent is the full takeover of the island).
|
I don't really see how that's the aim with the island. There's no realistic scenario where the US takes over Iran's oil infrastructure on Kharg for its own benefit without taking over the entire country, or at least enforcing a regime change to create a compliant state.
Nor do I think taking over an exposed (and tiny) island to launch an amphibious assault 30km away would make any kind of sense. And even if it did, they don't have any troops in any real numbers in that part of the world. It took something like 6 months to mass enough ground troops in the region for each of the Gulf wars.
The attacks and threats on Kharg are basically a clumsy attempt at brinkmanship to force deescalation. The US is likely hoping that by threatening basically all of Iran's oil industry, they may convince them to open up the Strait of Hormuz.
But Iran may view it as an empty threat. If they lose Kharg, then there's really no disincentive to heavily mining the straight to keep it closed or attacking oil infrastructure in the gulf nations and the US knows that. And unless the Iran regime falls, those kinds of things aren't really something that the US can totally prevent from happening. They tried to bomb their way out of Houthi attacks on shipping, and it didn't work, so they ended up giving up.
When you have fanatics leading one side and a government whose citizens freak out over $5/gallon gas on the other, the pain points are very asymmetrical. Iran is likely (and probably correctly) assuming that the US can't keep this up for the long term.