Ahli soccer rowdies had played a leading role in the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in 2011, and I saw them lining up around Tahrir Square last summer to provide security to a second round of protests. Ultras had often fought police after games, and used that experience during the revolution. Those in Egypt’s dissident movement already predisposed to see the military and police as holdovers of the Mubarak regime darkly suspected that police in Port Said had their own thugs target Ahli ultras in an act of revenge.

Even level-headed Egyptian authorities, such as judges in the judiciary, took this theory seriously enough to forbid the head of the Egyptian soccer federation to travel abroad, along with the governor of Port Said.

You can’t really understand the Arab world unless you appreciate the importance of what Americans call soccer (in most parts of the world it is just “football”). The first thing people ask me in Egypt once they discover that I speak Arabic is not where I am from or what I do, but if I am a supporter of the Ahli team or the Zamalik one. (I’ve lived on the island of Zamalik and, despite the opprobrium it will bring me in some circles, admit to being a Zamalikawi). People are passionate about their soccer. Enthusiasm for the game has helped them get through a very difficult year with a bad economy. And, young soccer enthusiasts are shock troops of popular street movements.

Among Friday’s big protests was one at the Ministery of Interior building in Cairo, the HQ of the state security police and a center under the old regime of torture and arbitrary imprisonment and punishment. At one point it was reported that police and military had been forced to abandon the Cairo television station, but the station denied that report.

Large numbers of protesters, in Cairo, Alexandria and elsewhere, were injured or sickened by military-grade tear gas deployed by police and security forces. In one incident, the wind shifted and blew the tear gas back at the police, which crowds saw as divine intervention. They shouted triumphantly, “God is Great!” A protester and an officer were said to have been killed.

The Arabic press is reporting that angry crowds threw stones at the HQ of the security policy in Suez, and wire services say two were killed there.

Ironically, Egypt’s generals may ultimately be brought down not by civil libertarians or Muslim fundamentalists but by young soccer fanatics. That wouldn’t be an entirely new phenomenon in Egyptian history. An earlier generation of Ahli ultras played a role in anti-British agitations that led to Egypt’s independence.

Trans. Juan Cole
From Whinfield 18
revised

Gareth Porter’s report, based on conversations with former officers in the administration of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who claim knowledge of Dempsey’s emphases, comes on the heels of controversial assertions by US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta that Israel may strike Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities this spring or summer. The press, and Panetta, keep reporting that Iran will ‘have enough enriched uranium to make a bomb’ in a year or two. But this assertion is so misleading as to be a lie. What Iran would have enough of is uranium enriched to 3.5% for reactor fuel. Only by embarking on an active program to turn this ‘seed stock’ into highly enriched uranium of 95% could they get material to make a bomb. Since UN inspectors are still visiting the enrichment sites (they were there this week), and since they specify that no civilian nuclear material has been diverted to military uses, we know that Iran is not taking this step. In order to take it, they’d have to kick out the inspectors and go for broke. We’ll know if they decide to do that. If they don’t do it, they just have LEU or low enriched uranium, which can be used to boil water but not for much else, and certainly not for a bomb.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Right wing, and their American backers in the Israel lobbies desperately want the US to go to war with Iran. Iran poses no real threat to Israel, but it does limit Israeli adventurism in Lebanon and elsewhere, and the Likud Party is all about no limits on its ambitions. Netanyahu and his American acolytes, such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, keep rattling sabers, not because they likely intend that Israel will go to war with Iran, but to put pressure on Washington to do it for them. If you have never heard of WINEP, just take it from me; your representatives in Congress care what AIPAC organs think far more than they care what you think. WINEP poobah Dennis Ross put out a rumor that Obama was ready to strike Iran. This disinformation 1) put pressure on Iran; 2) put pressure on Obama and 3) legitimized before the fact any aggressive Israeli action.

But the Obama administration is taking no chances that Netanyahu is bluffing. Hence Dempsey’s strict warning.

Obama wants to get the US out of fruitless Middle East wars, not plunge the US into new ones.

Moreover, campaign manager David Axelrod would have a cow at the thought of a war being launched in the midst of a presidential campaign season. Bombings can easily beget wars. Wars are unpredictable, and could spin out of control. You never want to do anything in a campaign season that you can’t control. Search on the Web for ‘Carter and Tabas” or “Operation Eagle Claw” if you want an example of why not.

High Israeli retired officers, including a former chief of staff are also warning against a strike on Iran. Being high officers, they have a realistic assessment of the disaster that could well ensue. Another former chief of staff, Lt. Gen (ret.) Dan Halutz, has just cautioned that Iran is a ‘serious’ but not an ‘existential’ threat to Israel. He is clearly disturbed that tossing around the phrase ‘existential threat’ about a country distant from Israel with very limited military capabilities sets the stage for more self-defeating adventurism.

What is striking to me is the glibness with which the Right wing speaks of an attack on Iran. The UN Security Council has not authorized the use of force against Iran, and Tehran has not attacked any other country. A strike on Iran is therefore a war crime, more especially since it would release radiactive toxins on the people of Isfahan and of the Middle East more generally.

Besides, proponents never say how they would pay for such a war. Iran is three times as populous and geographically much larger than Iraq. So multiply everything in that war by three to get the cost.

Immediate cost: $3 trillion
Long term cost, including veteran care: $9 trillion
US troops killed: 15,000
US troops fairly seriously wounded: 100,000

Iranian dead: 1 – 3 million
Iranian displaced: 12 million

Anyone who advocates such a thing is a sort of monster, in my view.

AKP and “Back to the Future” Turkish-Style

BARIN KAYAOĞLU

[For the Turkish version of this post, click here.]

The NGO Reporters Without Borders has demoted Turkey by 10 places in its World Press Freedom Index rankings for 2011-2012. The report’s statement that “the judicial system launched a wave of arrests of journalists that was without precedent since the military dictatorship [of the early 1980s]” reminded me of the “Back to the Future” movie series.

In the trilogy, the heroes use a time machine to go back and forth between the past and the future, which causes them to inadvertently change events and cause new problems. As Turkey tries to solve its old problems with outdated means, it faces the same contradiction as the heroes of “Back to the Future”: without learning from the mistakes of its past, Turkey seems destined to repeating them.

Most of the blame for that problem lies with Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP in Turkish). Just as the AKP deserves credit for the economic boom of the past 10 years, it is also responsible for the recent decline in democratic standards in Turkey. Especially under the counter-terrorism law of 2006, an increasing number of journalists and college students have been detained on terrorism-related charges, which include writing books that have not been published or reading others that are readily available in bookstores.

The point is not to berate the AKP. That is too easy and it is done elsewhere. The real question is why the AKP is turning to despotism at a moment when it tries to promote Turkey as a “model” in the Middle East?

The AKP’s authoritarianism rests on two possibilities:

- As Turkey’s prospects for joining the European Union decrease, AKP’s reformist reflexes have weakened.

- Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his cadres have a background in political Islam, which emphasizes a “culture of obedience.” Therefore, they never really had a reformist agenda.

Although both arguments have an element of truth, they fail to explain the full picture. For example, if EU countries’ reluctance to admit Turkey as a member had been the real cause for the AKP’s authoritarianism, most European politicians had opposed Turkish membership before Ankara had initiated accession negotiations with Brussels in 2005. In other words, Turkey’s chances for membership were quite small from the start. Nevertheless, AKP’s reforms, especially on the use of Kurdish in public, allowed the accession negotiations to commence. Despite the Eurozone crisis, AKP still insists that it is adamant about joining the European club. As such, to tie AKP’s increasing authoritarianism to the problems with EU membership is insufficient.

The second point is moot for similar reasons. If the AKP had never been genuine about its commitment to reform, it would not have bothered with the EU membership process so much. Moreover, if the “culture of obedience” is the paramount dynamic for political Islamists in Turkey, there would not have been a party called AKP today because Mr. Erdoğan and his friends could not have revolted against the leading traditionalists of the Virtue Party in 2001. At any rate, if a sense of obedience had been that strong among Turkish Islamists, three political parties with Islamist tendencies would not have existed in Turkey today (AKP, HAS, Saadet). “Obedience” is important for religious conservatives in Turkey but it is insufficient in explaining the current situation.

Which brings us “back to the future”: the state’s continuing predominant role in economic life and an insecure neighborhood makes authoritarian methods enticing for the AKP. The same is true for the party’s supporters in the media. In fact, many newspapers that supported the “soft coup” of 28 February 1997 (known for the date when the Turkish military gave a stern warning to Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan for his Islamist leanings, causing him to resign less than four months later) back the AKP today. Sabah newspaper, which supported the “28 February process” in 1997, today supports the AKP for similar reasons. It is owned by a business conglomerate that is close to the AKP. Sabah’s previous owners had been allied with hardline secularists.

Zaman newspaper is an even better example. Despite being part of the religiously conservative Fethullah Gülen movement, Zaman had also lent support to the military in 1997 (though not as overtly as secularist papers). Today, it is virtually the AKP’s mouthpiece and pretends to condemn the Turkish military’s role in politics.

The journalist Fatih Altaylı is another notable example. Mr. Altaylı had directed the most powerful criticism as a columnist against Mr. Erbakan in 1997 but today he is using his Habertürk newspaper to support Mr. Erdoğan.

The most important reason for the media’s support for the AKP is that large corporations with media interests do not wish to alienate the ruling party by raising their voice. No conglomerate likes to idea of losing a lucrative government contract because of its media outlet’s reporting. It is for that reason that mainstream media outlets do not investigate allegations and arrests under the ongoing “Ergenekon” and “KCK” cases. (“Ergenekon” refers to a network of army officers and their supporters who allegedly tried to carry out a coup in 2005 and 2007 while “KCK” is the alleged political wing of the Kurdish group PKK, which is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and the European Union.)

To be sure, auto-censor is not the only problem. Methods other than arrest are equally useful. Last summer, influential journalists Can Dündar, Ruşen Çakır, Banu Güven and Nuray Mert “left” the leading news network NTV while the columnist Ece Temelkuran was metaphorically thrown out of Habertürk in early January. All five were opposed to the AKP. The episodes bring memories of the military’s treatment of the journalists Mehmet Ali Birand and Cengiz Çandar in the aftermath of the 28 February coup.

The AKP’s stated aim is to not to take Turkey “back to the future.” Quite the contrary: it promotes Turkey as a viable “model” that combines democracy and free market capitalism to other countries in the region.

But Turkey could serve as a model only if it could consolidate a genuinely democratic regime. At the moment, most Middle Eastern countries already share the bottom of the World Press Freedom Index with Turkey. Unless the AKP remembers the dynamics that brought it to power in 2002 – authoritarianism, corruption, restrictions on the media (all products of 28 February) – it runs the risk of joining the parties that it defeated ten years ago in oblivion.

—

Barın Kayaoğlu is a Ph.D. candidate in history at The University of Virginia He is currently writing his dissertation on U.S. relations with Turkey and Iran during the Cold War and the origins of anti-Americanism in the two countries. This post was originally published in Turkish.

“Romney says, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair , I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich…. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

O’Brien asked him to clarify his remarks saying, “There are lots of very poor Americans who are struggling who would say, ‘That sounds odd.’”

Romney continues, “We will hear from the Democrat party, the plight of the poor…. You can focus on the very poor, that’s not my focus….”

Some statistics:

•Nearly 47 million people were in poverty in the US in 2010, up from 37.3 million in 2007. That was the 4th year in a row in which the number of people in poverty increased. In the 52 years that poverty rates have been being published, this is the largest number ever.

•20.5 million Americans are in “extreme poverty.” That is, their family income is $10,000 or less a year for a family of 4, about half that of the poverty line. But since they’re so well taken care of, Romney is not interested in those 20 million people. Or maybe it is because he knows that they don’t typically vote, being too busy on Tuesdays trying to make a living.

• There were 17.2 million households or about 1 in 7 that were food insecure in the US in 2010, the highest number ever recorded. (“Food insecure” means “at risk of going hungry.” About 1/3 of these households, or over 6 million, actually went hungry at some points of the year because they were not able to afford food. This hunger encompassed the children as well. Romney’s safety net is leaving millions of children hungry at times. He seems to get plenty of nice meals.)

Courtesy Courtesy crudeoilpeak.info

Europe doesn’t loom that large already. And, Asia and other global South areas would take up the slack.

The Party’s Over

There’s a reason Obama reelect doesn’t have a slogan.

All they’ve got is a question: Are you in?

Symbolic of this problem is what happened to Elizabeth Warren when her rise was met by Tim Geithner’s foot, and why Ron Suskin’s book Confidence Men made the Administration queasy. Since Pres. Obama was forced to make a recess appointment to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Warren created, you have to ask why he didn’t fight for Warren in the first place, because he could have appointed her in the same way. Pres. Obama’s leadership style is also seen in Wall Street firms earning more in Pres. Obama’s first years than in both terms of George W. Bush.

Then there’s Obama’s foreign policy, which picked up where Bush left off. Pres. Obama’s “serious reservations” didn’t keep him from signing the NDAA, something any conservative Republican president would have signed. Indefinite military detention without trial is now the policy of the Obama administration, which is something Mitt Romney would also do. There is no habeas corpus at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. What is called “targeted killing” has actually increased under Pres. Obama, something Glenn Greenwald writes about regularly. As for “secret prisons,” it’s not quite as a bad as Bush, because now people are held for a “short-term transitory” basis. But Pres. Obama’s surveillance program is identical to his predecessor. Candidate Obama was against the Iraq war, but he had no trouble bombing Libya without congressional oversight or approval, even though it was not of strategic interest to the U.S. or a clear and present danger. We’ve supposedly gotten out of Iraq, but there is a 104 acre embassy, the biggest on planet earth, with support and logistics to match.

It’s also why Pres. Obama showing up in Osawatamie, Kansas to use the Occupy message didn’t fool smarter folks, because if his leadership matched the words he spoke Robert Reich wouldn’t be floating hail Mary posts about switching Biden with Hillary.

Today, women’s concerns are focused on economics. But is it enough that the 111th Congress passed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which Pres. Obama signed? We should expect all 21st century politicians to support economic equality. But to laud something as fundamental as financial equity for the same job simply because Senate Republicans don’t reveals women, regardless of political party, are expecting way too little from our politicians who depend on our support to keep their job.

Pres. Obama proved his economic timidity in the 2010 midterms, when you didn’t hear anything close to the speech he gave in Kansas, which didn’t come until he began campaigning for his own reelection. At least he always has his own back. Back in 2010, he and his pal at the DNC, Tim Kaine, now running for Senate from Virginia, refused to make any Democratic case at all on economics. Obama then followed that up by caving and extending the Bush tax cuts. Obama and the Democratic midterm shellacking is what delivered state houses in record numbers to the right, which led to an assault on unions, the middle class, as well as women’s individual freedoms.

Looking at reelection, Pres. Obama decided to put politics over science on Plan B, even though it was proven completely safe for females, regardless of age. To make matters worse, because he evidently thinks women are stupid, he hid behind Secy. Kathleen Sibelius, the head of Health and Human Services, saying it wasn’t his decision. This kind of cowardice in a grown man is unattractive; in a Democratic president it is unacceptable.

It’s not like Plan B is an abortificient like RU486. All Plan B does is stop pregnancy or implantation. If you want a non-scientific description, this basically means ingesting a pill that makes a female’s uterus inhospitable for fertilization; a chemical change in the female’s body so a pregnancy cannot begin. It’s absolutely not an abortion, because there’s no fetus yet.

Pres. Obama made a choice any Republican president would have made. That’s not what I voted for in 2008 and not what Democrats have promised for decades.

Leader Nancy Pelosi gave Pres. Obama a pass on his Plan B decision, while Rep. Diana DeGette, a member of the so-called “Pro-Choice Caucus,” said she was “disappointed.”

George W. Bush inspired the rise of the Tea Party, so one hoped that Barack Obama’s repeated applications of conservatism would unleash a requisite uprising on the left. However, there has been no challenge to Pres. Obama, with progressives in Congress and outside groups again and again rallying for him, while choosing to ignore his choice of conservatism over progressivism.

Pres. Obama can’t find a reelection slogan because his 2012 campaign boils down to the reality that “hope and change” has been reduced to “Republicans are worse.”

That’s not good enough for me anymore.

———

Taylor Marsh blogs at Taylor Marsh and is author of The Hillary Effect: Politics, Sexism, and the Destiny of Loss

By Michael T. Klare

Ever since December 27th, war clouds have been gathering over the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow body of water connecting the Persian Gulf with the Indian Ocean and the seas beyond.  On that day, Iranian Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi warned that Tehran would block the strait and create havoc in international oil markets if the West placed new economic sanctions on his country.

“If they impose sanctions on Iran’s oil exports,” Rahimi declared, “then even one drop of oil cannot flow from the Strait of Hormuz.”  Claiming that such a move would constitute an assault on America’s vital interests, President Obama reportedly informed Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that Washington would use force to keep the strait open.  To back up their threats, both sides have been bolstering their forces in the area and each has conducted a series of provocative military exercises.

All of a sudden, the Strait of Hormuz has become the most combustible spot on the planet, the most likely place to witness a major conflict between well-armed adversaries.  Why, of all locales, has it become so explosive?

Oil, of course, is a major part of the answer, but — and this may surprise you — only a part.

Petroleum remains the world’s most crucial source of energy, and about one-fifth of the planet’s oil supply travels by tanker through the strait.  “Hormuz is the world’s most important oil chokepoint due to its daily oil flow of almost 17 million barrels in 2011,” the U.S. Department of Energy noted as last year ended.  Because no other area is capable of replacing these 17 million barrels, any extended closure would produce a global shortage of oil, a price spike, and undoubtedly attendant economic panic and disorder.

No one knows just how high oil prices would go under such circumstances, but many energy analysts believe that the price of a barrel might immediately leap by $50 or more.  “You would get an international reaction that would not only be high, but irrationally high,” says Lawrence J. Goldstein, a director of the Energy Policy Research Foundation.  Even though military experts assume the U.S. will use its overwhelming might to clear the strait of Iranian mines and obstructions in a few days or weeks, the chaos to follow in the region might not end quickly, keeping oil prices elevated for a long time.  Indeed, some analysts fear that oil prices, already hovering around $100 per barrel, would quickly double to more than $200, erasing any prospect of economic recovery in the United States and Western Europe, and possibly plunging the planet into a renewed Great Recession. 

The Iranians are well aware of all this, and it is with such a nightmare scenario that they seek to deter Western leaders from further economic sanctions and other more covert acts when they threaten to close the strait.  To calm such fears, U.S. officials have been equally adamant in stressing their determination to keep the strait open.  In such circumstances of heightened tension, one misstep by either side might prove calamitous and turn mutual rhetorical belligerence into actual conflict.

Military Overlord of the Persian Gulf

In other words, oil, which makes the global economy hum, is the most obvious factor in the eruption of war talk, if not war.  Of at least equal significance are allied political factors, which may have their roots in the geopolitics of oil but have acquired a life of their own.

Because so much of the world’s most accessible oil is concentrated in the Persian Gulf region, and because a steady stream of oil is absolutely essential to the well-being of the U.S. and the global economy, it has long been American policy to prevent potentially hostile powers from acquiring the capacity to dominate the Gulf or block the Strait of Hormuz.  President Jimmy Carter first articulated this position in January 1980, following the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  “Any attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America,” he told a joint session of Congress, “and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

In accordance with this precept, Washington designated itself the military overlord of the Persian Gulf, equipped with the military might to overpower any potential challenger.  At the time, however, the U.S. military was not well organized to implement the president’s initiative, known ever since as the Carter Doctrine.  In response, the Pentagon created a new organization, the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), and quickly endowed it with the wherewithal to crush any rival power or powers in the region and keep the sea lanes under American control.

CENTCOM first went into action in 1987-1988, when Iranian forces attacked Kuwaiti and Saudi oil tankers during the Iran-Iraq War, threatening the flow of oil supplies through the strait.  To protect the tankers, President Reagan ordered that they be “reflagged” as American vessels and escorted by U.S. warships, putting the Navy into potential conflict with the Iranians for the first time.  Out of this action came the disaster of Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian airliner carrying 290 passengers and crew members, all of whom died when the plane was hit by a missile from the USS Vincennes, which mistook it for a hostile fighter plane — a tragedy long forgotten in the United States, but still deeply resented in Iran.

Iraq was America’s de facto ally in the Iran-Iraq war, but when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 — posing a direct threat to Washington’s dominance of the Gulf — the first President Bush ordered CENTCOM to protect Saudi Arabia and drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.  And when Saddam rebuilt his forces, and his very existence again came to pose a latent threat to America’s dominance in the region, the second President Bush ordered CENTCOM to invade Iraq and eliminate his regime altogether (which, as no one is likely to forget, resulted in a string of disasters).

If oil lay at the root of Washington’s domineering role in the Gulf, over time that role evolved into something else: a powerful expression of America’s status as a global superpower.  By becoming the military overlord of the Gulf and the self-appointed guardian of oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, Washington said to the world: “We, and we alone, are the ones who can ensure the safety of your daily oil supply and thereby prevent global economic collapse.”  Indeed, when the Cold War ended — and with it an American sense of pride and identity as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism in Europe and Asia — protection of the flow of Persian Gulf oil became America’s greatest claim to superpowerdom, and it remains so today.

Every Option on Every Table

With the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the one potential threat to U.S. domination of the Persian Gulf was, of course, Iran.  Even under the U.S.-backed Shah, long Washington’s man in the Gulf, the Iranians had sought to be the paramount power in the region.  Now, under a militant Shiite Islamic regime, they have proven no less determined and — call it irony — thanks to Saddam’s overthrow and the rise of a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, they have managed to extend their political reach in the region.  With Saddam’s fate in mind, they have also built up their defensive military capabilities and — in the view of many Western analysts — embarked on a uranium-enrichment program with the potential to supply fissile material for a nuclear weapon, should the Iranian leadership choose someday to take such a fateful step.

Iran thus poses a double challenge to Washington’s professed status in the Gulf.  It is not only a reasonably well-armed country with significant influence in Iraq and elsewhere, but by promoting its nuclear program, it threatens to vastly complicate America’s future capacity to pull off punishing attacks like those launched against Iraqi forces in 1991 and 2003.

While Iran’s military budget is modest-sized at best and its conventional military capabilities will never come close to matching CENTCOM’s superior forces in a direct confrontation, its potential pursuit of nuclear-arms capabilities greatly complicates the strategic calculus in the region.  Even without taking the final steps of manufacturing actual bomb components — and no evidence has yet surfaced that the Iranians have proceeded to this critical stage — the Iranian nuclear effort has greatly alarmed other countries in the Middle East and called into question the continued robustness of America’s regional dominance.  From Washington’s perspective, an Iranian bomb — whether real or not — poses an existential threat to America’s continued superpower status.

How to prevent Iran not just from going nuclear but from maintaining the threat to go nuclear has, in recent years, become an obsessional focus of American foreign and military policy.  Over and over again, U.S. leaders have considered plans for using military force to cripple the Iranian program though air and missile strikes on known and suspected nuclear facilities.  Presidents Bush and Obama have both refused to take such action “off the table,” as Obama made clear most recently in his State of the Union address.  (The Israelis have also repeatedly indicated their desire to take such action, possibly as a prod to Washington to get the job done.)

Most serious analysts have concluded that military action would prove extremely risky, probably causing numerous civilian casualties and inviting fierce Iranian retaliation.  It might not even achieve the intended goal of halting the Iranian nuclear program, much of which is now being conducted deep underground.  Hence, the consensus view among American and European leaders has been that economic sanctions should instead be employed to force the Iranians to the negotiating table, where they could be induced to abandon their nuclear ambitions in return for various economic benefits.  But those escalating sanctions, which appear to be causing increasing economic pain for ordinary Iranians, have been described by that country’s leaders as an “act of war,” justifying their threats to block the Strait of Hormuz.

To add to tensions, the leaders of both countries are under extreme pressure to vigorously counter the threats of the opposing side.  President Obama, up for re-election, has come under fierce, even hair-raising, attack from the contending Republican presidential candidates (except, of course, Ron Paul) for failing to halt the Iranian nuclear program, though none of them have a credible plan to do so.  He, in turn, has been taking an ever-harsher stance on the issue.  Iranian leaders, for their part, appear increasingly concerned over the deteriorating economic conditions in their country and, no doubt fearing an Arab Spring-like popular upheaval, are becoming more bellicose in their rhetoric.

So oil, the prestige of global dominance, Iran’s urge to be a regional power, and domestic political factors are all converging in a combustible mix to make the Strait of Hormuz the most dangerous place on the planet. For both Tehran and Washington, events seem to be moving inexorably toward a situation in which mistakes and miscalculations could become inevitable.  Neither side can appear to give ground without losing prestige and possibly even their jobs.  In other words, an existential test of wills is now under way over geopolitical dominance in a critical part of the globe, and on both sides there seem to be ever fewer doors marked “EXIT.” 

___
As a result, the Strait of Hormuz will undoubtedly remain the ground zero of potential global conflict in the months ahead.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet. His newest book, The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources (Metropolitan Books), will be published in March. 

Copyright 2012 Michael T. Klare