26-29 September: Affordable Housing Development Summit Middle East, Manama
27-28 September: Unconventional Gas, London
3-5 October: Middle East Investments Summit 2010, Dubai
3-6 October: SWPF - Saudi Water & Power Forum 2010 Conference & Exhibition, Saudi Arabia
3-7 October: Funds Forum Middle East, Bahrain
4-6 October: POWER-GEN Middle East 2010, Doha, Qatar
10-12 October: The 3rd annual Saudi Arabia International Oil & Gas Exhibition & Conference, Dammam
11-12 October: Unconventional Oil 2010, London
12-14 October: Offshore Middle East 2010: The 3rd Annual Offshore Middle East Conference & Exhibition, Doha
18-19 October: Maghreb/Middle East Renewable Energy Conference, Marrakech
24-27 October: MENA Mining Congress 2010, Dubai
26-28 October: Iraq Mega Projects 2010 Conference & Exhibition, Istanbul
27-28 October: Gas to Liquids 2010, London
21-23 November: Private Equity World MENA 2010, Dubai
29 November-1 December: Iraq Petroleum 2010 Conference, London
6-8 December: Smart Grids Middle East, Dubai
Untitled Page
Issue 784, 23 June 2006
GCC states signal Iran fears with Hormuz contingency plan
The Gulf States are showing growing unease with Iran’s nuclear aspirations, reflected in the publicising of new plans to keep the Strait of Hormuz open in case of conflict.
As Iran continues to push for the best possible deal over its nuclear rights, the Gulf Co-operation Council sent a strong signal to the Islamic Republic by announcing on 14 June the development of a contingency plan to reduce the effects of a closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Soon afterwards, Qatar joined a number of other GCC states in declaring that radiological monitoring systems were going to be deployed around its borders.
By GCC standards, both measures were strong expressions of the Gulf states’ growing unease with Iran’s nuclear aspirations and the potentials for conflict from a range of other issues.
The GCC’s Hormuz contingency plan remains classified. GSN’s sources suggested that details were thin on the ground because the ‘contingency plan’ was merely a shell that concealed a broad agreement to co-operate but had, as yet, very little detailed consideration of operational issues.
This interpretation is entirely consistent with previous GCC plans; these have all been drafted by the very small GCC Secretariat in Riyadh, which has little autonomy of decision-making.
It is not just the nuclear issue that is making GCC states nervous – they see the Islamic Republic becoming more assertive on several fronts. Iran’s re-emergence as a real security concern was shown earlier this year when League of Arab States secretary general Amr Moussa enjoined the GCC to address the hoary old theme of Israel’s nuclear deterrent and got a diplomatic rap over the knuckles from UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah Al-Nuaimi, who said: “We share his concerns… but we in the Gulf also have our own concerns and fears. I hope that Amr Moussa would take into consideration the GCC states when he talks about the concerns of the Arabs.”
Tactfully raising environmental worries rather than hard security issues, Al-Nuaimi made GCC anxieties bluntly plain: “We are in a region close to the [Iranian] nuclear reactor in Bushehr. We have no guarantees or protection against any leakage [from the reactor] which is on the Gulf coast.”
The GCC called for a nuclear-free Middle East and asked the international community to keep the Gulf free of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
The GCC’s mid-December summit statement did press Israel to open its installations to inspection and join the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but Iran is clearly the greater cause of concern. GCC secretary-general Abdelrahman Al-Attiyah specifically called on Tehran to join a common effort to keep the Gulf free of nuclear weapons.
Mounting GCC concern over freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz is a testament to how seriously the Gulf states take the risk of an international crisis featuring the United States and Iran.
There is a definite sense of jumpiness region-wide. When the US Embassy in Qatar undertook a routine national evacuation plan in conjunction with major US companies, the exercise sent a ripple of disquiet through Qatari government and social circles.
There is no greater threat than closure of the Strait for the GCC states and world markets. An estimated 15m b/d of oil flow through Hormuz, squeezing out of a waterway that is less than 40km wide at its neck and reliant on single inbound and outbound deep channels for tanker traffic.
In the next two decades, the Strait will become an even more target-rich environment, as forecast congestion raises the numbers of maritime passages from 1,400/d to 4,200/d, and oil transit from 15m b/d to an estimated 30m-45m b/d.
Hormuz: Iran’s deterrent
But Iranian interdiction of tanker traffic in the Strait is unlikely to be undertaken in conditions short of a blockade on Iranian exports; closure of Hormuz is primarily a deterrent weapon for Tehran. Indeed, Iranian rhetoric on Hormuz has been remarkably consistent in the last 25 years. In 1983, then president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said: “We will block the Straits of Hormuz when we cannot export oil… We would close the Straits of Hormuz if the Gulf became unusable for us. And if the Persian Gulf became unusable for us, we will make the Persian Gulf unusable for others.”
On 4 June 2006, Rahbar (Supreme Leader) Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared: “If you make any mistake, definitely shipment of energy from this region will be seriously jeopardised… you will never be able to protect the energy supply in this region.”
Then, as now, Iran considered attacks on shipping – a military mission termed sea-denial – to be a weapon of last resort, only to be employed if Iran’s oil exports were under attack.
Replacing the Strait
The GCC’s Hormuz contingency plan remains classified, and is probably still just a framework co-operation accord, with little detailed operational content.
The 14 June discussions included consideration of boosting the capacity of the East-West Crude Pipeline in Saudi Arabia (to shift oil to the Red Sea), but there is no real alternative to Hormuz.
GCC states have invested heavily in Gulf littoral processing plants and export terminals for oil and liquefied natural gas, and pipelines such as the East-West Crude Oil Pipeline boast neither the capacity nor the cost-effectiveness to serve as long-term alternatives to the Hormuz export route.
If oil markets are tight to begin with, Iranian harassment of shipping could directly impact oil prices for some months and maintain the ‘fear factor’ in oil prices for much longer.
If Hormuz cannot be replaced, it must be defended – currently the US Fifth Fleet’s task. If Iran threatens to blockade Hormuz or carry out more selective attacks on shipping from nations that support the US policy, then the US Navy will be responsible for maintaining sea control (upholding any sanctions while demonstrating the ability to defeat Iranian capability to close the Strait). Similarly, if Iran escorted its shipping within the Gulf to resist some kind of maritime sanction, the USN would be responsible for maintaining a selective policy of naval interdiction while deterring further Iranian escalation.
These missions will always be primarily US responsibilities, at least until such time that other great powers – such as the emerging China and India – begin to project force into the Gulf. The USA has registered a strong interest in assisting regional allies to display preparedness for a future conflict and to invest in defensively-focused homeland security capabilities ranging from civil defence plans, hardened facilities, secure ports, escorted shipping, meaningful air and missile defences.
According to US thinking, these capabilities could help to modify Iranian strategic intentions, using deterrence by denial to make attacks on the GCC states more costly and less likely to succeed – thus making it easier for the USA to shield local allies from Iranian coercion or from retaliation related to US policies. Such steps could influence and shape Iran’s concept of employment for WMD (maintaining them as a deterrent of last resort, rather than a useful coercive tool).
The US military will continue to focus on the development of shared early warning and missile defence in the Gulf alongside the hardening and dispersal of US and allied military assets in the region and the development of GCC crisis management and consequence management capabilities.
This raft of measures, gathered together under the existing Co-operative Defence Initiative, could reduce the coercive utility of Iranian nuclear weapons, particularly if weapons scarcity and immature delivery capabilities are defining features of Iran’s embryonic WMD capability.
The extension of deterrence and layered defence, plus the diffusion of targets offer ways of making WMD use less attractive to Iran and less credible to regional states.
Mixed messages from the GCC
US National Security Council Under Secretary Bob Joseph toured the GCC in late May to encourage greater involvement in shared early warning and anti-missile defences.
However, GSN has learned that Gulf leaders were unequivocal that now was the wrong time to engage in arms sales that could raise the level of tension in the region.
At about the same time Joseph was touring, President Ahmadinejad visited Kuwait, where Emir Sheikh Sabah told journalists: “There is no room for concerns about peaceful nuclear activities of Iran.”
According to GSN’s canvassing in Washington, the White House continues to be infuriated by what it sees as the GCC’s dangerous appeasement of the Islamic Republic at a time when the US government is seeking to forge a full-court diplomatic press against Tehran. Not for the first time, Washington’s style of dealing with Iran is mismatched with that of the more nuanced strategy of the GCC states.
