Iran’s new stranglehold in the Gulf challenges Bush

At the very start of the potentially dangerous three-month transition period in the US, when America effectively has not one president but two, Iran has taken the significant strategic and geo-political step of extending its military presence in the world's most important oil conduit, responsible for the passage of some 40 per cent of the world's traded oil on every day of the week.

Within just two days of US forces striking across the Iraqi border inside Syria to kill Abu Ghadiya, a militant they alleged had been funnelling "foreign fighters" allied to al-Qaeda into Iraq, Iran unveiled plans to open new naval bases at Jask, a port east of the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Gulf and others along the coast of the Sea of Oman it boasted would form an "impenetrable line of defence".

Referring to the latter string of bases which will extend from Bandar Abbas, a major Iranian seaport on the Strait of Hormuz ­ the world's busiest waterway for oil shipments ­ to Passa Bandar, near the Pakistan border, Iran's hardline Navy Commander, Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, warned: "If the enemy goes insane, we will drown them at the bottom of the Indian Ocean and the Sea of Oman before they reach the Strait of Hormuz and the entrance to the Persian Gulf."

It fell to the Deputy Army Commander, Brigadier General Seied Abdolrahim Moussavi, to spell out that it was the two American aircraft carriers, the USS Ronald Reagan and the USS Theodore Roosevelt, plus their respective battle groups who are currently forming twice the normal US naval presence in the oil-rich region, that were being referred to.

"Like the elements of a computer game," he added provocatively, the carriers were currently under the permanent gaze of Iran's Armed Forces.

All this might have come as little more than ritual flexing of military muscles and par-for-the-course anti "Great Satan" rhetoric had it not happened to coincide with a resurgence in intelligence chatter about new advances in Iran's alleged attempts to manufacture a nuclear bomb.

On October 21, Iran's 24-hour PressTV network (with London studios in Ealing) was quick to point out a report on Israel's Debkafile website "which has close ties to the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad". The report claimed that US intelligence had made a new assessment about Iran's nuclear programme, estimating that the country "would be ready to build its first nuclear bomb in February 2009".
“If the enemy goes insane, we will drown them at the bottom of the Indian Ocean”Iran has repeatedly made known that its first reaction to any US or US-assisted Israeli strike on its nuclear network (which it insists is for civilian energy purposes only, despite its possession of huge oil reserves) would be to block the Strait of Hormuz, which has been the focus of increasing tension in recent months.

Although Rear Admiral Sayyari did not specify the type or number of warships and weapons to be deployed at Jask, it is known that Iranian naval doctrine is based around asymmetric attacks against Western navies using swarms of small, high-speed fibreglass boats armed with anti-ship missiles and coming under the command of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Worrying as all this would be for European and moderate, Sunni-dominated Arab governments at the best of times, it is much more so because it comes when none of them has a certain answer as to how George Bush will use his last days in the White House before his final departure on January 20.

During the three unpredictable months which are just beginning, already seen by dovish European diplomats and full-blown Israeli hawks alike as the most likely window for any attack on Iran's widely scattered nuclear network, either by the US itself or by the Israelis assisted by Washington's necessary nod and wink, the outgoing president will ­ in the word of one liberal critic ­ be free to exercise "the most unaccountable form of power that the democratic world has to offer".

In the twilight weeks of the transition, there are bound to be those like Vice President Dick Cheney, ready to advise that should further hard evidence of Iran's nuclear ambitions emerge, Bush might take the opportunity to ensure that all is done to try and ensure that the emergence of an Iranian bomb is eliminated ­ whatever the consequences on the ground or the high seas.