There are constant claims that Iran’s regime killed 40k in two days.
Nothing is verified by the West. There were early claims 150k. Again nothing verified.
But I will put it to you this way. Would you believe 40k at the height of the protests? Would you believe murders in the prison system? Where does that leave you for January and February? The violence is unquestioned. The number could be ballpark.
We do not have access to the number. I know you are not claiming the 7000 one of our agencies KNOW has happened.
That would be too temporary to matter. Also matter to who? The person who gets laid off of course. The wealthy? Not so much.
We have bigger fish to fry at home.
The regime becomes unstable if this keeps up. They need money from oil exports.
But all American presidents and Israel…and now SA and the Arabs getting bombed won’t back off later.
Pipelines will be built to avoid the Strait. Desalination plants will be protected and locations moved, possibly redundancies added. Next time the Arab states will be readier.
You are acting like Al is choosing sides. That shuts down the conversation. It does not matter what sides the rest of us take. This is not a polling place.
All recessions are temporary. Even the Great Depression was temporary. They still matter. A lot. If the Straits remain closed for more than 4-6 weeks, you’ll likely the largest recession since the 1930’s - even bigger than the Great Recession following the housing crisis. Which was also temporary, if you’ll recall - and mattered a great deal to almost everyone.
Perhaps - but that stuff takes years to build, so those responses are mostly irrelevant to the current situation. Iran has the ability to precipitate one of the deepest recessions since the Great Depression, and (so far) they’re exercising that ability. We don’t appear to have any effective response to it - apparently, we can’t yet provide operational safety to even our own warships in the Straits, let alone to any commercial vessels. So even if “next time” there might be infrastructure in place to avoid this vulnerability, the vulnerability exists now - and Iran is exploiting it.
That depends on when Iran sees much of this as futile for them to be fighting. The idea this can be repeated and they’d have no leverage is part of the calculous. The leaders get picked off again next time.
Yes, that soon for a significant recession. Maybe a week or two longer to be get close to the 1930’s:
The longer the strait is effectively closed, the greater the chance the world tips toward a “deep recession,” said Greg Priddy, an expert on energy market disruption who worked at the U.S. Energy Information Administration in the George W. Bush administration. He said it would take more than a month to get back to normal if the war were to stop today, but that there will not be “normal tanker traffic as long as Iran has weapons to throw at tankers.”
Priddy, who is now a senior fellow at the conservative Center for the National Interest, said keeping the current volume off the market for another seven weeks would cause a major global economic contraction so severe that it would create “probably the worst recession that anyone has seen since the 1930s.”
It’s not just oil being used for transport - it’s massive amounts of petroleum-based agricultural products and feedstocks for industrial processes as well. Closing the straits for even a few weeks means that you’re damaging access to those essential inputs for many, many months, because those facilities aren’t built to be turned on and off, and once they’re stopped it will take some time to spin them up again.
The release from emergency petroleum reserves of 400 million barrels is enough to make up for about three weeks of Gulf transit volumes. Once we get past that, things get very hairy…
And they close the Gulf again next time as well. Again, it’s going to be years before you can replicate the Gulf’s transit capacity with new infrastructure - little of which makes much economic sense compared to using the Gulf, which is why only modest alternative transport capacity exists today. In any time frame that matters to Iran’s current decision making, such alternative transportation systems would be relative modest and mostly incomplete.
It’s exceptionally unlikely that they’re just going to give up and let traffic in the Gulf proceed as normal. They have every incentive to stop traffic as much as possible, as long as possible, to inflict maximum economic harm on the U.S.
Transit through the Gulf is about 20 mbpd of oil. And that’s just oil - about 20% of global transport of liquified natural gas also goes through the Gulf. As well as massive proportions of the world’s transported inputs for fertilizer (urea, ammonia, sulfur) and petrochemical feedstocks for plastic and other industrial products. Which things don’t have IEA reserves, and are less amenable to alternative transport routes.
Why wouldn’t they? As you point out, they just went out and slaughtered tens of thousands (more than a hundred thousand in your telling) of innocent civilians. They have overwhelming superiority in organization, training, and access to weapons to repress the civilian population.
I think this is just wishful thinking. It’s exceptionally unlikely that there exists anything in Iran that could form the basis for an effective opposition to the IRGC - which has spent decades using repressive violence and a massive security state for the express purpose of making sure that there were no nascent opposition organizations that could serve as the kernel for such groups.
But we know that the members of the group that were willing to kill Iranians have sufficient operational control over the group to have all those protestors killed. Not just a small amount, BTW. One hundred and fifty thousand, you’ve suggested. An unconscionable amount of civilians to be slaughtered by a domestic security force - and resulting in no visible signs of fracture or organizational degradation within the IGRC. So it’s probably, again, just wishful thinking to imagine that there’s some materially large contingent within the IGRC that has a problem supporting the current regime. It’s theoretically possible - it’s not against the laws of physics - but there doesn’t seem to be any publicly available evidence that this is at all likely to be the case.
Rather than the contrary proposition, which is that an organization willing to slaughter more than a hundred thousand people to keep the regime in power is pretty much institutionally on board with keeping that regime in power and is unlikely to change course, and that any dissenting voices within that organization are either sidelined or have long been weeded out before rising to any position of influence.
Ideas are more powerful in the long run. The regime does not represent the Persian people. In time either power shifts is gets wiped away. There is the possibility of a bloody civil war or a peaceful change of hands.