THE MISTAKE THAT CLOSED THE STRAIT OF HORMUZAn expert on Iran says the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei led to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz
Amatzia Baram is a former Israeli Army tank commander who went on after army duty to earn a doctorate in philosophy and become chairman of Middle Eastern History at Haifa University. He also served as an adviser to Israel’s intelligence services. I have written about his work before. Baram is now retired from academia and produces analytical studies for Geopolitical Intelligence Services. His most recent report, “The Hormuz Crisis Was Hiding in Plain Sight,” tells us more than many may want to know about the ways President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got it wrong when they jointly attacked Iran earlier this year. The attack included the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his immediate family, planned by Mossad and the CIA. Khamenei had worked, indirectly, as I reported at the time, with US Air Force General Charles Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the last years of the Biden administration. But Brown, an African American who earlier had served as chief of staff of the Air Force and as deputy commander of the US Central Command, was quickly fired by Trump and replaced by a far less experienced white reserve Air Force lieutenant general. In Baram’s analysis, there was much reason to believe, from international media and various intelligence sources, that murdering Khamanei would, as he writes, remove “the only restraint” on the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and turning the waterway into “the central battleground of the war.” Baram relates that while he was in graduate school in 1979, after publishing an open source analysis of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein’s strategic thinking, he was summoned to a meeting by Yehoshua Sagui, then the major general in charge of IDF military intelligence. The secret IDF assessment at that time concluded that Hussein was intent on invading Israel. “Drawing solely on open Iraqi media,” Baram wrote, “I argued that Saddam was preparing the Iraqi people for war with Iran.” Eleven months later, Saddam invaded Iran. “That day,” Baram writes, General Sagui appeared on Israeli television and predicted that the Iraqi forces would rout Iran’s forces “in four days” and then would turn around and invade Israel. “The [Iraqi] war with Iran lasted eight years,” Baram dryly notes. “Saddam emerged victorious, but if ever there was a Pyrrhic victory, this was it. . . . Both Saddam and Israel’s chief of military intelligence underestimated Tehran’s willingness to endure severe losses.” Open source intelligence played a role in Baram’s assessment back then and it could have played, if considered at the right time, an equally prominent role, he writes, in assessing the possible Iranian response to the joint US-Israeli attack on Iran that began in February. The assassination of Khamenei “was especially important,” Baram writes, in “Tehran’s thinking about the Strait of Hormuz.” Baram said that Khamenei was reluctant during the June 2025 12-day war with Israel and the US to shut down the Strait of Hormuz despite a parliamentary vote to do so. The restraint came, Baram writes, because he had publicly endorsed what he called “heroic flexibility” when the survival of the Islamic Revolution was at stake. It was understood then, Baram quotes Abbas Aragchi, Iran’s foreign minister, as saying at the time that if “the supreme leader had been a target” in 2025, “the strait would close.” If the foreign minister was right, Baram writes, Khamenei “did not authorize a closure, even in response to a new attack, unless there was an assassination attempt against him.” The American and Israeli planners “could not have known of this, but if they had followed Iranian media, they would have known that numerous clear threats to close the strait in the event that an attack [on Khamenei] were made, yet they decided not to give them real weight. “If there was any chance of avoiding closure in the February-April 2026 campaign, it lay in keeping Khamenei in place. He was assassinated on the first day.” Baram adds, however, that there even were published reports in the US media noting that the CIA has assessed that if Khamenei were killed in the bombing to come he would be replaced by “hard-line figures” from the aggressive Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who killed thousands of anti-regime demonstrators in Tehran and elsewhere during the winter. “Why did the leaders [in the US and Israel] ignore this public and classified information?” Baram asks. He reports that the IRGC views Khamenei’s assassination “as an unforgivable humiliation. History suggests that Khamenei’s removal deprived the IRGC of the political-religious authority that had previously allowed it to retreat without humiliation,” especially in the aftermath of its most recent excessive murders of demonstrators against the regime. Baram concludes: “There was no one to whom they could shift the blame for not closing the strait, so they closed the strait and attacked their neighbors.” Trump and Netanyahu made a decision to assassinate a leader whose death led to an unforeseen crisis in the flow of vital oil from the Middle East to the world. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Seymour Hersh, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. |