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Comment by tjwebbnorfolk | Hacker News Reader

You're taking this claim way too seriously. Iran is at war. This part of the information war. Nobody is going to pay fees to Iran to use internet cables.

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This was all theory before the war. Now Iran knows they can blockade that Strait and makes these demands so they have much more leverage.

They can make all the demands they want. I can demand you give me a thousand bitcoin to not burn your house down. That doesn't mean it has any remote chance of happening.

You're going to burn down his house no matter what?

> Now Iran knows they can blockade that Strait and makes these demands so they have much more leverage

Tehran has more potential leverage inasmuch as they've credibly demonstrated they can block the Strait. Whether they have more actual leverage than before is uncertain–trade flows are routing around them. And their own shores remain blockaded. (Just because the U.S. has less leverage than it did before doesn't mean Iran necessarily has more.)

It’s not like they can shut down the main air corridor to Asia if they please, right?

> not like they can shut down the main air corridor to Asia

"Shut down" is not particularly accurate. America and Europe can route around. The only ones fucked are the Gulf carriers.

I don't think they can blockade it for long anymore.

What's to stop Iran from using the threat of cutting those cables as leverage? A speedboat and a depth charge are all it takes, and neither are particularly difficult to make.

> What's to stop Iran

What's to stop them? The enormous pile of ordnance floating in the gulf of oman that can be easily dropped on Tehran, for one...

> The enormous pile of ordnance floating in the gulf of oman that can be easily dropped on Tehran, for one

Probably not. The other comment is right: cutting cables means having its own cables cut. (Tehran is also probably weighing whether it wants to continue mobilising almost all of its neighbors against itself. Trashing e.g. Kuwait for shits and giggles isn't strategically productive.)

Tehran is also probably weighing whether it wants to continue mobilising almost all of its neighbors against itself

Interesting point. It might be a good time for some good old-fashioned false-flag action.

> might be a good time for some good old-fashioned false-flag action

It's always "a good time for some good old-fashioned false-flag action" if you can pull it off. Given Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are already bombing Iran, and are now unaligned, there wouldn't be much for the U.S. to gain from something like this. (And if Israel were to pull off a false-flag operation against the U.S. now isn't better or worse than tomorrow or yesterday.)

Appeasement doesnt stop it, that's for sure. They would still be free to do it.

Appeasement worked just fine when the JCPOA was signed. It might have continued working had Trump not unilaterally rescinded it.

The problem is that you can only do it once.

The threat of force is much more potent than the actual use of force: this has been the delicate dance that the US has used with Iran since the Revolution.

It took an idiot to try and actually use the full force of the USAF against Iran and reveal that the force was manageable- not great, but not going to topple the regime. And once that force was used and Iran's leaders realized it could be survived, that threat became much weaker, forcing a decision onto that previously mentioned idiot, he could either escalate to use greater force (some form of ground troops) or admit that he made a mistake and lost a war. And I suspect that the same will be true for Iran: the threat of cutting those cables is far more potent than the actual effects of cutting the cables.

The Internet is, it turns out, pretty good at routing around damage. The Russians have done some cable cutting in the Baltic Sea and it is annoying but it is not a winning move.

See in an information war, it doesn't have to be true to be dangerous, and never assume how stock prices might effect people's resileance. The greater point is there are cans of worms that are opening that weren't anticipated. This is just one example;].

What is nobody going to do if Iran military cuts cables?

Or blocks repair ships after normal accidental damage?

I imagine they'll be able to cut exactly one cable before the US starts bombing them again. If my goal is to profit from subsea cables I don't own, getting bombed doesn't sound like a great strategy if I'm Iran.

It's information war to scare US companies away from the middle east.

Do you think the US was holding back on bombing Iran? It doesn't work; they have always prepared for an American attack, because they are a government that was formed by overthrowing the dictatorship that the US installed after destroying their democracy, and the US has been constantly threatening them ever since.

This is the only fight they've been preparing for. They knew they were going to be facing an overwhelmingly superior navy and air force. That's why everything is dug in, buried and hidden. It's also why the propagandistic idea that they're a "terrorist state" is stupid, because a terrorist state would be prepared to do terrorist damage. The only terrorist arming and funding was from the US and Israel to people in Iran. I don't even see any heightened security at any level in the US - we're not even expecting anything.

Don't believe that the US can eradicate all ability for Iran to do something as trivial as cutting an undersea cable anytime soon. They would still have the ability cut the cables as a last gasp after they were totally defeated at every level.

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