A Way Out?

A host of new military and covert options.

“I start every day pretty much the same way: Coffee and News Items.” — Richard Haass, senior counsellor at Centerview Partners, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former US diplomat.

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1. The New York Times:

President Trump’s sudden announcement that he could take up to two weeks to decide whether to plunge the United States into the heart of the Israel-Iran conflict is being advertised by the White House as giving diplomacy one more chance to work.

But it also opens a host of new military and covert options.

Assuming he makes full use of it, Mr. Trump will now have time to determine whether six days of relentless bombing and killing by Israeli forces — which has taken out one of Iran’s two biggest uranium enrichment centers, much of its missile fleet and its most senior officers and nuclear scientists — has changed minds in Tehran.

The deal that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei rejected earlier this month, which would have cut off Iran’s main pathway to a bomb by eventually ending enrichment on Iranian soil, may look very different now that one of its largest nuclear centers has been badly damaged and the president is openly considering dropping the world’s largest conventional weapon on the second. Or, it may simply harden the Iranians’ resolve not to give in.

It is also possible, some experts noted, that Mr. Trump’s announcement on Thursday was an effort to deceive the Iranians and get them to let their guard down. (Source: nytimes.com)

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2. Iran retains the naval assets and other capabilities it would need to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a move that could pin any U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf, American military officials say. In meetings at the White House, senior military officials have raised the need to prepare for that possibility, after Iranian officials threatened to mine the strait if the United States joined Israel’s attacks on the country. Pentagon officials are considering all of the ways Iran could retaliate, as President Trump cryptically hints at what he might do, saying on Wednesday that he had not made a final decision. In several days of attacks, Israel has targeted Iranian military sites and state-sponsored entities, as well as high-ranking generals. But Israel has steered clear of Iranian naval assets. So while Iran’s ability to respond has been severely damaged, it has a robust navy and maintains operatives across the region, where the United States has more than 40,000 troops. Iran also has an array of mines that its navy could lay in the Strait of Hormuz. The narrow 90-mile waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the open ocean is a key shipping route. A quarter of the world’s oil and 20 percent of the world’s liquefied natural gas passes through it, so mining the choke point would cause gas prices to soar. (Source: nytimes.com)