Iran Drones and Mines Attack 15 Ships in Strait of Hormuz

The Rocket-Propelled Grenade

One notes, in the inventory of the past ten days, a single rocket-propelled grenade. Not grenades. A grenade. It sits in the account beside drones and mines, the way a pocket watch might sit in a museum case of artillery shells, and nobody seems to have asked what it is doing there. A drone is a policy. A mine is a policy with patience. A rocket-propelled grenade fired at a container ship is a man in a small boat, close enough to see the paint, holding something on his shoulder and choosing a moment. One learns to pay attention to the item in the catalogue that is a different size from the others.

The official account is tidy: Iran has attacked at least fifteen container ships in the Strait of Hormuz. I do not dispute it. I only observe what has been gathered under that one verb. Unmanned aircraft are steered from somewhere inland by people with screens. Mines are laid at some earlier date and then left to wait, indifferent to flags, schedules, or which ministry is currently in favour. And there was the grenade. These are three different relationships between an attacker and a victim, operating on three different clocks. The mine may have been decided weeks before the drone; the grenade may have been decided by one person in a matter of seconds. They are counted together because they happened in the same water, and water, it turns out, is a very persuasive filing system.

Consider the phrase “at least.” It is the phrase of a person counting in the dark. A floor is offered and no ceiling. Somebody has a list, and the list is still growing, or the list has items whose membership is being argued over. Navies count one way. Underwriters count another, because a hull that struck something unidentified pays out differently from a hull that was attacked. Shipowners have their own reasons, which may run in either direction, to describe an incident as an act of war or as bad luck. The number fifteen is not a measurement. It is a settlement between several parties who all had to agree to write it down.

One also notes the ships. The Strait of Hormuz is known to every schoolchild, and to every commodities desk, as the throat through which oil passes. Yet the specimens collected here are container ships, carrying boxes of shoes and machine parts and the thousand small objects of everyone’s ordinary week. I offer no theory. I record that the famous cargo is absent from the list of victims and the anonymous cargo is present, and I wonder who decided that, and whether they decided it out loud.

The strongest objection deserves its full weight. A state under pressure uses whatever it has. Revolutionary Guard naval units are known to be decentralized by design, and a mixed arsenal is exactly what a deliberately loose command would produce. The single grenade is not an anomaly, the objection goes, but a signature. I accept this. Then I note what it concedes. If the arsenal is mixed because the command is loose, then “Iran” in the sentence is not one actor but a population. Some of its members steer drones from offices, some laid mines on a schedule no one now remembers, and one of them, at least, fired from a small boat. A naturalist would not call that an organism. He would call it a reef: many small creatures, each following local rules, which from a distance look like a single structure with a single intention.

And the reef suits everyone who describes it. Tehran gains the reputation of a coherent hand on the valve. Foreign governments gain a coherent adversary, which is far easier to brief, sanction, or escort against than a scatter of actors with separate grievances. Insurers gain a category. The wire services gain a headline that fits on one line. The word “Iran” does a great deal of unpaid labour in that sentence, and nobody involved has much reason to relieve it.

The stakes, one is told, are maritime security, trade, and the risk of escalation. Escalation is worth looking at closely. It presumes a ladder and someone deciding to climb it. A reef does not climb. It accretes. The danger may be less that a government chooses war than that a strait fills, polyp by polyp, with small separate decisions until some ship’s master finds the way closed and nobody can say who closed it.

So the record holds fifteen ships, or more. It holds machines from the sky, devices from the seabed, and one projectile fired by hand. The narrative holds a single verb. Somewhere in the incident reports, if anyone thought to write it down, is the distance between that small boat and that steel hull. I would very much like to know whether it was close enough for the man on the boat to read the name on the bow.