Burning tankers or imaginary ones, and I honestly can’t decide which is worse.
Yesterday the IRGC Navy announced it had hit four tankers in the Persian Gulf for the crime of using the wrong lane. The charge, as CBS News carried it:
monitored and pursued four violating vessels that had previously passed through an illegal route [illegal under whose law, exactly?]
The IRGC said the four “are burning”, that three more “struck mines west of the Strait of Hormuz”, and that every one of them had been on the southern route along the Omani coast, the one the U.S. escorts tankers through. Within hours Trump posted on Truth Social that “They are even making up fake hits, mines, and everything else.” Nobody on that page verified either side. So which is it? Either the Islamic Regime occupying Iran set ships on fire for driving in the lane it doesn’t own, or it invented the fire while Brent climbed to about $112. I can’t find the version where they come off well.
A short history lesson is needed: they’ve had a toll booth since March. Foreign Policy, citing Lloyd’s List, reported ships moved onto a route between Qeshm and Larak islands where the IRGC checks nationality, ownership, cargo and crew, at an estimated $2 million a transit. When Oman announced a corridor near its own coast in June, the IRGC declared, per Euronews, that “the only authorized routes for passing through the Strait of Hormuz are those announced by the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
I’ve seen this movie before. On July 24, 1987, the reflagged Kuwaiti tanker Bridgeton hit an Iranian mine near Farsi Island on the very first Earnest Will convoy (she didn’t sink; she limped to a drydock in Dubai and sailed on until 2002). A supertanker makes a lousy minesweeper, but an honest one: it finds the mine exactly once. Anyway.
Back in June the IRGC said Oman’s route was drawn “without prior notice or coordination with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” and that sailing outside its own routes is “highly dangerous and prohibited.” With a war on and, by the IRGC’s own count, mines in the water, one traffic controller is safer than two, and Iran has the long shore. That’s a fair point about traffic, and it dies the moment the traffic cop is also the man at the cash register and the man announcing who got shot for taking the other lane. Marco Rubio put the fee business plainly: “You can call it a toll, you can call it a fee, at the end of the day it’s all semantics.”
What I keep picturing is a guy on a freeway on-ramp with a clipboard, charging two million a car, and bragging that everybody who took the frontage road got firebombed. Did he? I don’t know, and I’m not sure he does either. I just know I don’t want him near my freeway. My sympathy goes to the deckhands on those tankers, who didn’t pick the lane and don’t get a vote.
FAIL, both versions. I’d happily take the Iranian lane through Hormuz, toll and all, the day the people stamping the permits answer to Iranians instead of to the IRGC.