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You’re the captain of one of Her Majesty’s warships and you’re on patrol in the Strait of Hormuz. The call you’ve been half-looking forward to and half-dreading comes through: there is a tanker under attack and you are to intervene.

You’ve been preparing your ship for this moment for over a year. You, personally, have been preparing for it your entire career. You are instinctively familiar with your ‘inherent right of self-defence’ and you have forensically studied the rules under which you may engage the enemy not in self-defence. You have probably done a Gulf trip five times before, but it was different back then. JCPOA was in full swing and “disciplined restraint” was the (US) buzz-phrase. The rhetoric from across the Atlantic doesn’t sound like disciplined restraint anymore. A ship has just been detained in Gibraltar; others were mined only a month ago. Your intelligence officer is busy trying to evaluate all this and determine what it means to you, right now. You know that if you are too aggressive you could take your country, and others, into a disastrous shooting war – not aggressive enough and your ship could get hit. You’re the captain now, it’s the middle of the night and this responsibility lies solely with you.

It’s worth taking a quick look at the lie of the land, as it were. The Strait of Hormuz runs east/west but in a curve round Oman. It’s approximately 21 miles wide, the same as the Dover Strait and almost as busy.

The United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) states that territorial waters (TTW) extend out to 12 nautical miles from the coast. Anything outside that is classed as High Seas and, in accordance with international maritime law, freely available to all vessels. Inside 12nms and you are in the host nation’s waters and with a few exceptions, you need permission to be there, especially if you are a warship. There are also restrictions on what you can and can’t do in terms of flying and operating boats etc. In cases such as Hormuz (Gibraltar, Bab El Mandeb etc), which are less than 24 miles wide, the TTWs therefore overlap. However, they require constant access so an International Strait is formed. There are still regulations as to what you can and can’t do in there but you don’t need host nation permission to enter as you would for territorial waters.

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Originally posted by HighZonie:
Satellite photos show burning Iran space center launch pad

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Originally posted by HighZonie:

One Democratic lawmaker floated a theory to The Hill's Scott Wong that combines Iran with other buzzword of the day: impeachment.

Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) said Wednesday that President Trump could launch a war with Iran for a purely political reason: to deter Democrats from impeaching him.

"I believe that the president of the United States is on the cusp of taking us to war without the consent of Congress because he fears impeachment. And we all know that if we are at war, the American people would not agree that you should be impeaching a president," Wilson said in an interview in her Capitol Hill office.