In a speech to foreign ministry staff Saturday, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reiterated President Hassan Rouhani’s suggestion earlier this month that if the United States succeeds in cutting off his nation’s oil exports, the Tehran government may block other nations’ oil shipments through the Persian Gulf. That would cut off sea passage of oil from Bahrain, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. About a fifth of the world’s oil production moves through the Gulf. Iran’s biggest oil customers are China, India, and Korea.
This isn’t the first time that Iranian officials have warned that they might retaliate against U.S. actions by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, the 29-nautical-mile-wide passage between the Persian Gulf and the open ocean.
During his speech, Khamenei, who has ultimate authority in Iran over matters of foreign policy and defense, rejected new talks with the United States, saying, "The word and even the signature of the Americans cannot be relied upon, so negotiations with America are of no avail." His remarks appeared on his website and were reported by the state-owned PressTV.
Meanwhile, citing several unnamed “senior U.S. officials,” NBCNews reported Friday that Iran is making preparations for a broad cyberattack against the United States. Such an attack is not imminent, they say.
In May, the Trump regime unilaterally withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement—known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—and said it would reimpose economic sanctions. A “snap back” provision in that agreement allows the negotiating parties to reimpose sanctions if Iran violates the nuclear agreement. The body charged with periodically determining whether the parties are fulfilling their obligations in that agreement has repeatedly reported that Iran is in full compliance. That fact made no never mind to Donald Trump who was determined to break the agreement as soon as an excuse, however bogus, could be conjured up.
The first set of sanctions will be reimposed on Iran’s automotive sector, gold trade, and other industries in just two weeks, on Aug. 4. Sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran and the oil industry will come into effect November 6.
The other signatories to the multilateral nuclear agreement—the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China—have sought to keep the agreement alive despite the U.S. withdrawal. Russia and China are dead set against going along with reimposed sanctions. That may also be true of Germany, the U.K., and France since the U.S. refused last week to grant them exemptions on sanctions. The U.S. has pushed aggressive diplomatic efforts to get those and other nations to go along with the reimposed sanctions.
One of the targets for those efforts is India, which gets 11 percent of its oil from Iran, its third biggest supplier. U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley was in India last month to urge Prime Minister Narendra Modi to cut oil imports from the Islamic republic.
It’s hard to imagine how a military clash in the Gulf among Iran, its neighbors, and the United States could be avoided if a blockade was imposed, even if that conflict might be fought by a proxy, say, Saudi Arabia, which, like its sworn enemy in Iran, has a powerful military. Such a clash, perhaps minor at first, could easily escalate once the casualties pile up. Only graveyards would benefit.
Trump has always opposed the agreement. In part, that’s because it was a signature element of President Obama’s foreign policy approach in the Middle East, and Trump can’t stand anything Obama is given credit for. In part, it’s because U.S. neoconservatives have his ear in this particular matter. Some of them, like National Security Adviser John Bolton, have been urging attacks to overthrow the autocratic Iranian government for decades.
Since the beginning of his campaign three years ago, Trump has repeatedly boasted that he could dump Obama’s “terrible” deal and make a better arrangement with Iran. He’s still saying that. At the NATO summit last week, for instance, he said that—under pressure—Iran’s leaders will phone him and knuckle under:
But Iran’s Foreign Ministry responded by saying that if Trump wants to negotiate after pulling out of the international agreement, he would have to "initiate the call himself" because Iran’s top leadership is now rejecting any talks with the United States.
As for the cyber matter, Courtney Kube, Carol E. Lee, Dan De Luce and Ken Dilanian at NBCNews reported:
Cyber threats have been a major theme of the 2018 Aspen Security Forum, with administration officials from Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, FBI Director Chris Wray, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein all warning of the pervasive danger from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.
In Aspen Thursday, Coats said that Russia was a more active cyber foe than Iran or China — "by far" the most aggressive, he said.
Cyber attacks can, in theory at least, bring a modern nation to its knees, at least temporarily. Power plants can be hacked and electricity cut off, bank accounts can lose records, chemical plant operations can be fouled up, Amazon deliveries can be bollixed because GPS isn’t working, and cellphone and other communications can be blacked-out. And worse.
The United States is no bystander in such matters.
Alireza Miryousefi at the Iranian mission to the U.N. told NBC News that the U.S. “is the most belligerent cyber attacker in the world, repeatedly attacking military and civilian targets across the world.” He later tweeted: “Iran has no intention of engaging in any kind of cyber war with the U.S. Frankly, from our perspective, [it’s] more likely the U.S. wants the supposed suspicion of an attack as rationalization for a cyber attack against Iran.”
The United States has launched cyberattacks against Iran. In 2005, the Bush administration targeted that nation’s nuclear industry with a computer worm called “Stuxnet” that wrecked hundreds of the centrifuges Iran was using to concentrate uranium at an underground facility at Natanz. Subsequently, once elements of the worm became public, the Obama administration speeded up cyberattacks on Iran’s centrifuges in a project code-named “Olympic Games.” It sent an upgraded worm that temporarily took out 1,000 of what was then about 5,000 working centrifuges.
The Obama administration also prepared a more comprehensive cyberattack plan in case talks with Iran failed and a military conflict ensued. This was called “Nitro Zeus.” David Sanger and Mark Mazzeti reported in 2016 that this involved thousands of military and intelligence personnel and millions of dollars:
While the Pentagon was making those preparations, American intelligence agencies developed a separate, far more narrowly focused cyberplan to disable the Fordo nuclear enrichment site, which Iran built deep inside a mountain near the city of Qum. The attack would have been a covert operation, which the president can authorize even in the absence of a continuing conflict. [...]
The development of the two secret programs suggest how seriously the Obama administration was concerned that its negotiations with Iran could fail. It also demonstrates the critical role cyberoperations now play in both military planning and covert intelligence operations. American generals began incorporating nuclear weapons into their war plans for protecting Europe or countering the Soviet Union in the 1950s, and in the last 15 years, they have made armed drones a central part of military efforts in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere. In the same way, cyberwarfare has become a standard element of the arsenal for what are now called “hybrid” conflicts.
Since cyberoperations are already an element of modern warfare, the United States would be at a disadvantage were it not to take seriously the threats entailed in such operations and develop both offensive and defensive measures to deal with them. That’s why United States Cyber Command was created nine years ago. Being prepared is a good thing.
But there’s no reason to be shocked or outraged at the thought that another nation—one that has come under direct and highly damaging cyberattacks from the U.S.—has also decided to be prepared.