On August 24, I wrote on Siege Warfare in the Modern Middle East, followed on September 2 by The Siege Is On. All That's Left Is the Waiting.
Both were followed by the usual people protesting "We want big explosions NAOW" and "finish the job!" and while I sympathize, that's not how sieges work. What sieges do is make the besieged power suffer as their materiel slowly dries up, their people become more and more dissatisfied, and their government becomes more and more desperate.
Modern sieges differ in the details, but if anything, they're more punishing than in medieval times. In Iran, the US Navy blocked nearly all commerce going in or out, while Israeli intelligence and covert operations have been brutal, gutting the security command and also doing immense damage to Iran's proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, and Gaza.
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The blockade has been very effective. The numbers are pretty brutal, but you have to be careful of the source. Iran's official numbers, republished by Al Jazeera, claim trade is down by 25–35%.
But consider the source.
The published numbers are year-to-date, which means over a whole five-month span (the Iranian year starts on March 21). Realistically, the squeeze of the siege started in mid-July, with a major ramp-up in August. That five months includes one month under the Memorandum of Understanding, which allowed Iran some significant breathing room.
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Since the blockade was reimposed, Iranian oil loadings are down 85–88 percent — but oil loadings aren't oil actually leaving and going into the world market. With the effects of the blockade, seaborne crude out of the Gulf is effectively down 100 percent: the loadings are being put on ships, but the ships aren't leaving the Gulf.
In the meantime, oil is moving through the Strait of Hormuz from other countries. The numbers are hard to nail down, but CENTCOM will defend 10 million to 11 million barrels per day; UBS, the Swiss bank, estimates 12 million bpd, with good days at 14 million. That's still less than the pre-war 20 million, but what's important to the siege is that it's effectively 0 million bpd of Iranian oil through the Gulf.
Outside of oil, there has been some trade even with the blockade — some shipping across the Caspian Sea, some truck and rail shipping across the Iranian borders. But that's nothing like what Iran needs, and there are other issues, like thousands of trucks stalled at the border and unable to enter Iran.
A lot of people still insist that it's not a real siege unless trade is completely 100% blocked; so maybe it's not a real siege, but it's penury and sparkling economic starvation.
Of course, Operation Economic Outcast, which also started in late August, not only added new sanctions on oil, but also sanctioned shipping, the shadow fleet, gold, technology, and the financial channels the IRGC uses. All told,
Official average inflation is in the neighborhood of 70%, with food and drink much higher, while the exchange rate for the rial is around 2.2 to 2.3 million rials per dollar. (The official rate is 42,000 per dollar, and while I'm sure the government would love to buy dollars at that rate, there aren't a lot of sellers.)
There is a massive recession, with first-quarter GDP down 10 percent year-over-year. And that doesn't include the effects of the blockade.
The economic pain has become extreme. Medicine prices are up 80% to 300%, food is up 130%–135% at the moment, and overall year-over-year inflation is around 90%, not the government's 70%. The official minimum wage is around $75 a month, and with allowances, total income is maybe as much as $120. The Iranian papers say that a family of four spends most of that on food.
The real flashpoint is gasoline. Iran has oil, but can't refine or import enough gasoline, with shortages of 10-20 million liters per day, and official warnings of only a couple of months of supply. The natural result is long queues and an official increase in the unsubsidized price to 100,000 rials a liter — and police and Basij deployments to go with them.
To top it off, the UAE took Iran's missile attacks very badly; the UAE's resulting embargo matters more for inputs than the US Navy does. Dubai was Iran's primary access to external markets already; the UAE embargo cut off re-export and "hawala" — unofficial person-to-person trade arrangements.
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The bottom line is that the combination of blockade, UAE embargo, and "Economic Outcast" hurts.
Following the huge — and brutally suppressed — demonstrations in December and January, there have been a number of reports of small demonstrations against the Islamic Republic by pensioners, oil workers, teachers, and truckers. Add to that more significant insurgencies by Iranian Kurds and the Baloch southeast, near the Pakistani border. It's still largely around the edges.
Sieges are not like other tactics: when a siege is on, it can seem like nothing is happening — and then, suddenly, everything happens.
