US attacks resume

As the USA resumes attacks on Iran, peace recedes

While the USA and Iran trade missiles for a second night on Thursday, the mediators of the Memorandum of Understanding establishing the ceasefire have scrambled into action. Pakistan and Oman has started contacting both sides and urged restraint, calling for de-escalation. This shows that their primary concern is the same as that of the rest of the world, which is the operation of the Hormuz Strait. The latest round of hostility had in fact originated with the Hormuz Strait, with Iran firing upon tankers it said had not sought permission to pass through them, and the USA trying to take out the Iranian shore installations through which it interdicted passage.

The USA had tried this particular method of opening the Strait but had failed, mainly because it had been unable to pinpoint the Iranian shore installations which allowed it to carry out the blockade. Unless the USA used the ceasefire to develop a more accurate intelligence picture of those installations, there is no reason to believe that its bombing would be in any way more effective than before. The Strait is still key to the entire world economy, which had faced steadily climbing oil prices ever since the first US and Israeli attacks on Iran, including the one killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on February 28. There was a temporary ceasefire on April8, which became permanent on June 17, after the two countries’ Presidents signed a Memorandum of Understanding on how to proceed further.

There have been breakdowns before during negotiations, starting with Israel’s attacks on the Hamas team in Qatar. Iran has experienced two rounds of talks followed by attacks, the first last summer, and now this winter. It is almost as if the USA has barely launched a summer attack now. The rest of the world will watch now as the Strait is blocked once again, to see how far oil prices will rise. Apart from oil, natural gas, fertilizer and aluminium also pass through the Strait. The break has not been long enough for the world to recover completely from the first closure, and it does seem as if the only country wanting a resumption of the fighting, Israel, has lucked out. Though its has agreed to ceasefire talks in Lebanon, now it seems that the US pressure on it will disappear.