Pentagon’s ‘Iron Gate’ Operation: Washington Moves To Choke Off Iran’s Overland Military Trade

Despite the Iran war being very obviously deeply unpopular with the American public, Washington is seeking to tighten the noose on Tehran, particularly on the economic front.

This weekend saw the Pentagon unveil details of a new initiative called “Task Force Iron Gate” – which will seek to target Iranian alternative trade routes amid the US naval mission to blockade its main ports via the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf waters.

The effort seeks to strangle Iran’s overland military and technology supply networks, including by better monitoring the Caspian Sea region.

“The establishment of Task Force Iron Gate reinforces the success of our ironclad blockade against Iran at sea,” said CENTCOM chief Adm. Bradley Cooper. 

“Strengthening CENTCOM’s collaboration with U.S. interagency partners will further constrain Iran’s ability to finance terrorism, rebuild weapons factories, and replenish their military,” the top commander added.

Michael Mulroy, a former US deputy assistant defense secretary for the Middle East, has further described that the operation will seek to comprehensively “cut the regime off from its ability to fight and ability to fund itself.”

An appointed task force will focus its sole efforts on finding out where “weapons systems are coming in, how they could potentially be cut off” and how “Iran is transporting its energy”.

CENTCOM said it will be be run by 20 civilian and military personnel, presumably with significant coordination from the National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).

The task force will be based in Tampa, Florida – which is home to both CENTCOM headquarters and US Special Operations Command (SOCOM).

But disrupting overland trade will be easier said than done, given Iran shares borders with no less than seven countries: Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Pakistan Turkey, and Turkmenistan.

A Revolutionary ‌Guards spokesman ‌was quoted as saying on Sunday that Washington’s aims are impossible.

“The Iron ‌Gate plan is merely a wordplay, the Americans cannot achieve their objectives of imposing severe economic pressure to cause economic collapse in Iran through this approach,” spokesman Hossein Mohebbi told the semi-official Fars news agency.

Geographiclly, Iran dwarfs neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, and is more than double the size of Ukaine. Iran is also the size of almost half the European continent. Also Iran’s population is more than double (over 90 million people) that of neighboring Iraq’s. 

And so the prospect of significantly disrupting all overland military or industrial-related trade is a tall order, or even one might call it a fantasy.