A new report from Reuters is claiming that the Iranian government is helping Syria in something it has become quite skilled at, keeping the oil flowing in the face of international sanctions aimed at preventing such exports.
The report cites unnamed industry sources who say that Syria was able to sell some $80 million in oil directly to China’s Zhuhai Zhenrong Corp, and that Iran lent Syria a tanker with which to deliver the product.
Zhuhai Zhenrong denied the allegations, and a spokeswoman said she had “never heard about this” claim. Syria has traditionally sold all of its oil to Europe, but those shipments halted over sanctions.
China has been a popular export location for Iranian oil in recent months, and along with India and Japan is one of the few major markets remaining now that the EU has closed its borders to Iranian and Syrian oil.
So the Chinese might be buying Syrian oil and using an Iranian tanker to deliver it. Sounds like a completely realistic and believable plot to conquer the world! Maybe the FedGov fleet should impose a close blockade on Tartus and take a play out of the grand British tradition by launching a preventive sneak attack on the Russian warships stationed there, a la Copenhagen 1807. It's what the neocon god of war Churchill would have done . . . (Yes, I know that something superficially similar to the Copenhagen gambit was used by the Japanese at Port Arthur in 1904 against the Russians, but that was the blueprint for Pearl Harbor 1941, and therefore has no substantive resemblance whatsoever to morally pure and objectively noble British preventive sneak attacks.)
As it is a legal and just thing for Iran to do, exactly what corrupt and criminal thing are we trying to do?
If the Americans weren't bombing civilians, and the Israelis weren't continuing to steal Palestinian land with impunity, I might become incensed. But since we "good" guys are hardly angels, why should I really care what Iran does? Their behaviour seems perfectly acceptable to me.