Ladies and gentlemen, behold the much-discussed Strait of Hormuz. The white space above is water, the greenish space is land. To the left, the Persian Gulf -- to the right (east), the Gulf of Oman. To the north, Iran. To the south, Oman. At its tightest point, there are just 21 nautical miles between Oman and Iran. That is even smaller than the mileage between England and France at the narrowest part of the Channel. Within that span, only an even smaller portion is actually useful for large vessels such as oil tankers, about two lanes, each two miles wide, separated from each other by a 2 mile buffer zone. Until a few days ago, roughly 20% of the world's oil supply was passing with regularity through the Strait of Hormuz. The name of the strait comes from nearby Hormuz Island, and the name of that island may come from a corruption of the name Ahuramazda, the Supreme deity in Zoroastrian religion. The closure of that strait for any l...
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Let us continue through the regional security complexes of the globe with the authors of REGIONS AND POWERS as our guides. The Middle East is an RSC. Buzan and Waever divide it into three parts (subcomplexes) -- from east to west these are: the Persian Gulf, the Levant, and the Maghreb. The Maghreb -- Libya, Tunisia, Morocco etc. -- seems to these authors' rather uninteresting, although it figures of necessity in ideological movements of pan-Arab or pan-Islamic coloration. The Persian Gulf and the Levant are, as one might expect from students of international security, quite fascinating to our authors. I will offer three quotes on the Middle East from this book. p. 198, "Having itself exposed the weakness of Britain and France in 1956, thus hastening their departure from the region, the United States was drawn into the vacuum. To the extent that Soviet successes had linked communism and Arab radicalism in US thinking, Israel's resounding success in the 1967 established it...
I think this is amazing, for a lot of reasons. There's a big infrastructure deal in the works in the Persian Gulf. The Iraq Ministry of Oil has decided to buy the creation of am artificial island, from a Dutch marine construction company, Boskalis. Their plan involves the creation of two new pipelines and four new marine docks to create an island that will enable Iraq, through its Basra Oil company, to add 3 million barrels per day to its export capacity. It is amazing because I tend to think of infrastructure projects at this level as a thing of the past -- where "past" means Dwight Eisenhower and Robert Moses. Of course oil rigs and such get created, especially in the Persian Gulf. But this is a three-year construction project that could be disrupted at any time during that run by war or violence short of war, and that could easily end up a dead loss for Iraq or Boskalis if that happens. It's a gutsy move.