Well, we can get all the very latest on this now with our military analyst Sean Bell. Uh, good morning, Sean. Good to have you in the studios as always.
Car Island, uh, smaller than Gibraltar. Hugely significant, though. Just explain why.
Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it, for many people have never even heard of it. It's about 5 miles long, about 2 and a half miles wide. It's right at the northern edge of the Persian Gulf.
Is actually about 300 miles, I think, away from the Straits of Hormuz. Um, but it is where 90% of Iran's oil flows out of. Um, and therefore, you know, for the exports anyway, 7 million barrels a day, they can cope with up to 10 of these massive super tankers at any one time.
So, President Trump's claimed he's obliterated all the military targets on there. That includes airfields, air traffic control towers. Uh there's some helipads and there's also some naval personnel there.
What's interesting that when he says he's obliterated, he's talked about the airfields. I've seen some of the video of the strikes. Yeah.
What's your assessment? Well, the trouble is with airfields is they're very, very big bits of concrete and they've certainly plugged holes into each of the runways, but we used to do that in the Cold War and it doesn't take much to fill a tipper up with gravel, pour it on, put a layer of um tarmac on the top of it, and off you go again. So, it's not a permanent um potholes effectively.
Well, yeah, they're big, but they are effectively potholes. Um I I think the interesting bit about the story though is that President Trump didn't target the oil and made a really big thing about that. And I think if you look more widely, a lot of that oil goes to China and therefore if he was to take that out, you might risk the eye of China and the whole thing starts to expand even further.
Yeah. So, um, yeah, a tailored strike. Interesting to see what impact it has.
Um, there's been a lot of talk about the US and whether or not it would be willing and the the consensus seems to be not, to send boots, have boots on the ground. um where does this plan of sending 5,000 Marines sit within that as a wider context? Yeah, it's fascinating because it's being played out and let's be quite clear, these US Marines are probably a couple of weeks away.
So, we're not talking about anytime soon and we've just finished the first two weeks of the war. So, two weeks is a long time in terms of this Iran conflict and it might therefore be nothing more than a threat by President Trump just to show that he is willing to consider boots on the ground. I think what's been fascinating is that the war general has been almost migrated in two separate wars.
There's the military parts of it. American superpower dominating everything on the ground, there's no question, you know, Iran can't win that. But it's also this sort of ideological war that's going on.
And unless America is prepared to put boots on the ground, it's pretty clear air power alone will not change Iran's intent to build a nuclear weapon uh and will not stop its intent to to keep attacking American forces as they're there. So I do think that you know Iran is left with 70,000 Shahid drones probably still got a leadership in place. It may not be the original leadership but sounds even more hardline sounds like sort of version 2.
0 but even more vengeful. Um and then you've got proxy still active and the Straits of Hormuz and therefore I suspect the Marines are how do you solve that Straits of Hormuz problem? It seems to be an impossible conundrum doesn't it?
Yeah. And the longer that Iran um take looks after that straight form was the more it can do this whenever it likes. And I was chatting to some military colleagues earlier in the week and they said if you really want to solve that you've actually got to invade Iran at least and and take a section of ground all the way around the straits and actually guarantee its security.
Now whether or not President Trump has got the appetite for that because the one thing against President Trump in all of this is time. It's the one factor Iran has got lots of time. Trump has not.
He's going to run out of air defense weapons. He's got the midterm elections coming up. Every day that goes by, we're getting more casualties.
And the KC 135, that tanker, you know, um tragically lost their life, which is close to my heart because obviously it's air crew. When I flew around, we had an ejection seat, so if you get shot down, you can still get out. These boys and girls do not have that luxury.
So, um the longer these goes on, the more likely it is that we're going to see more casualties and um repatriation ceremonies back to America. And just finally, um, the decision by the US to to lift these sanctions on Russian oil. I mean, the the Europeans are going to be ringing their hands over that.
I I I think this is profound. Absolutely profound because we've seen for the last few months, in fact, best part of a year, Europe desperately trying to keep President Trump involved to support Ukraine, to support NATO. And one of the strategies is that Europe hasn't want to get involved militarily with Ukraine, but economically it's trying to drive Russia economy to the ground, so it can't afford to prosecute the war.
Apparently, it's about a billion pounds a day. Well, all of a sudden now in a heartbeat, Trump, without consulting the European colleagues, has gone, "Yeah, we can buy Russian oil again. It's worth about $150 million a day to Russia.
That will be converted into weapons, to bombs, to missiles to fire into Ukraine to recruit more soldiers. " Not a word of consultation with European colleagues. And I think this simply reemphasizes that President Trump is only focused on President Trump and the US.
