from the recent CERAWEEK
CERAWEEK: US has few good options on Strait of Hormuz, former defense secretary says ( James Mattis )
"I don't think we can just walk away from it now that we've broken that construct, and say we won and so it's over," Mattis, who served as Defense Secretary during the first Trump administration, said. "We're in a tough spot, ladies and gentlemen, and I can't identify a lot of good options."
"You can say it's over, and you can even declare victory, and guess what, the enemy gets a vote," Mattis said. "And that will undo everything you think you set out to accomplish."
Despite military successes -- Mattis said the US and Israel had effectively destroyed the Iranian air force and navy -- any campaign to control the vital shipping lane would require a highly complex campaign of attacks on small anti-ship cruise missiles, which Mattis said "can be fired off the back of a pickup truck" from anywhere along hundreds of miles of Iranian coastline.
Mattis said Iran had likely not placed mines in the Strait of Hormuz because the regime sees an opportunity to "clear ships going through and show sovereignty over the strait." He also said US forces could seize and hold Kharg Island, Iran's key energy export hub, but that the military lacked a strategic rationale for doing so.
"They would, I think, surrender their ability to ship oil for a while, thus worsening the world's energy supply problem, because that actually puts us on the horns of a dilemma with the world saying we need the oil and there's the Americans sitting on it," Mattis said. "So we actually create [a problem] with a military success."
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Suzanne Maloney, vice president and director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution, said that despite suffering significant military losses, the Iranian regime believed it had gained leverage in the conflict.
"From their perspective, they not only survive that first onslaught, but they have actually gained what they believe is the upper hand by taking this crisis that began with the goal of regime change, or perhaps the goal of eradicating, for the second time, Iran's nuclear program, and they have now moved it into a geo-strategic conflict where they believe they have the advantage," Maloney said at CERAWeek by S&P Global Energy.
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