Skullduggery in the Gulf of Oman

Interestingly Moon of Alabama thinks that Iran might indeed be behind the mysterious attacks of two tankers in the Gulf of Oman this morning:

The keyword here is "petrochemical". The tankers hit today were loaded with naphta from the UAE and methanol from Saudi Arabia. Both are petrochemical products and not simply crude oil. Last Friday, June 7, the U.S. sanctioned all trade with Iran's biggest petrochemical producer. These sanction will seriously hurt Iran. 

When the Trump administration began to sanction Iran's oil export last year, Iran announced new rules of the game. It said that it would retaliate against other Persian Gulf producers should Iran be unable to export its goods.

But after reading The New York Times dispatch (see "Tankers Attacked Again in Gulf of Oman, Raising Fears of Wider Conflict" by Richard Pérez-Peña, Stanley Reed and David D. Kirkpatrick) my first thought is that it is an Israeli-led operation, possibly in alliance with the MEK:

It was not immediately clear how the most recent attacks were carried out or by whom, just as the circumstances of last month’s attacks remain murky. The two ships that were struck on Thursday appeared to have been more seriously damaged than those hit in May. 

On a visit to the U.A.E. about two weeks ago, John Bolton, President Trump’s national security adviser, said without disclosing any evidence that Iran was “almost certainly” responsible for the attacks in May, which Iranian officials denied. “Who else would you think is doing it?” Mr. Bolton asked. 

But other American officials and Iran’s regional adversaries have been more cautious about publicly assigning blame. Emirati officials described the attacks as state-sponsored, but did not specify a state.

The incident appears to be part of the expanding conflict between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis of Yemen.

The Times story makes it sound as if the crew of one of the tankers attempted to fend off the attackers, which would lead one to believe that these attackers were glimpsed, and possibly recorded:

The other tanker, the Panamanian-flagged Kokuka Courageous, was carrying methanol, and the Iranian state news media reported that it, too, was on fire. It was reportedly headed from the Saudi port of Al Jubail to Singapore. Both the ship’s owner and its operator said that all 21 crew members had abandoned ship and were later rescued by a nearby vessel.

“We received a report that our ship was attacked,” Yutaka Katada, the president of the ship’s operator, Kokuka Sangyo, said at a news conference. The crew, all Filipinos, “kept trying to avoid the attacks, but again received an attack three hours later. So crew members left the ship by lifeboats.”