Originally Posted by
ATNotts_2
With your experience would you say there were any concise aims in place at the beginning of this operation or indeed proper planning to achieve them, if there were any?
My experience is a few decades old, and the Maritime Embargos that I saw or had a link to (in the Adriatic and in the Persian Gulf) were coalition operations, and were not called out as blockades. Mostly a "pull them over inspect" regime. The decision to impose a blockade is a fairly serious one, and like the problems we ran into with Former Yugoslavia, there is an extensive land border behind the coasts being monitored or shut down. In Iran's case, there has been an active arms trade between them and Russia for some years. Be it a close or distant blockade, it takes time for such measures to have an effect, and there are always efforts made to evade them or counter them.
If the objective is to squeeze the oil revenues, I look back to the UN sponsored embargo / sanctions on Iraq in the 1990's, and note that even then a 'shadow fleet' was alive and well. (Also: there were some humanitarian exceptions in that embargo under the various UNSCRs which I don't see as any part of what the current move has).
What the folks in Washington are doing is covering some new ground. Previous efforts in the Gulf were still (in the background) focused on the generally free movement of oil/energy in and out of the Gulf for the benefit of all global customers. What I am seeing at the political level is a version of Iran's "if you bleed, I bleed" approach (as they attacked various Gulf States).
The operating mind set seems to be this:
"OK, you shut down their oil, we'll shut down your oil, and the customers have to deal with that on a case by case basis."
That strikes me as fundamentally different than the previous embargos in the Persian Gulf, in terms of tone and intent.
I am out of the loop (and my contacts in DC have been drying up over the past few years as people retire or quit), so I am not sure how close to the mark my analysis lands.
Originally Posted by
BonnieLass
Out of curiosity, how would the US respond to this idea?
Who knows? Each morning brings a new point of view. Seems like a good idea to me, but nobody is answering my calls.
As to what lars mentions: I recall the foreign workers in the Mid East when I was there (has it really been over 20 years?) who sent home remittances. From memory, the most common labor imports were from the Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Indonesia. (But I may have crossed a few wires in memory). They did hard jobs in the hot sun, and were treated like dirt.