Iran Building Up Its Naval Bases On The Strait Of Hormuz

While we're involved in the dog and pony show our election has become, the mullahs are not sleeping.They're enlarging their naval bases on Strait of Hormuz, the narrow neck of water that controls the Persian Gulf's oil supply:

Iran has begun building a line of naval bases along its southern coast and up to the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the strategic Gulf oil waterway, the Tehran Times quoted an Iranian commander as saying.

Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said the bases were being built on the Sea of Oman coast from Pasa Bandar, near the Pakistan border, to Bandar Abbas, Iran's major port on the Strait of Hormuz, the English-language newspaper reported on Thursday. {...}

"The new mission of the navy is to build an impenetrable line of defence at the entrance to the Sea of Oman," Sayyari said in Hormuzgan province in south Iran, the Tehran Times reported.

"If the enemy goes insane, we will drown them at the bottom of the Indian Ocean and the Sea of Oman before they reach the Strait of Hormuz and the entrance to the Persian Gulf," he said.

Iran has threatened to close the strait, the sea route through which two-fifths of the world's globally traded oil passes, if the United States attacked. Iranian officials have often said Washington would be foolish to contemplate an attack.

The object for the mullahs, of course is not to build major naval installations for their own navy. It's to build missile launchers and bases to target oil facilities in the OPEC states to blackmail them to comply with Iran's diktats,to provide port facilities for the Russians and to have the ability to offset US power by acquiring the ability to shut down the oil routes from Saudi Arabia and the UAE.