Two Iran leaderships. One that cares bout Iranians and one that cares only about jihad.

This becomes the biggest issue when dealing with Iran.

So on Saturday the Foreign Minister for Iran announced that the Strait was open for business and the Iranians in charge of the strait were giving clearance for ships to go through. Dozens of ships actually went through the strait late Friday and early Saturday.

Then, suddenly others in Iran, including the Parliament Speaker and members of the Republican Guard were demanding that it was closed and started sending speedboats out to shoot at ships. They shot at an Indian ship, a French ship, and a British ship. They did no real damage, but they forced the ships to turn around. They went on to criticize the stupidity of the Iranians who made the deal with the US and suggested that they needed to get tougher and stand by their own list of ten demands. Demands, which of course, are pretty much ten things that the US and Israel will never agree to.

Obviously one hand does not know what the other hand is doing or more likely one hand doesn't like what the other hand is doing. Who is "really" in charge here is at question and the answer appears to be nobody, really. In the UK and others, the royal leadership is largely ceremonial and everyone understands it. In some countries the elected leaders are known to be proxies for royal or religious leadership. In Iran, both the elected leadership and those following the supreme leadership believe they are ultimately in charge. When there is no clear leadership, then generally nobody is in charge.

Today, the more extreme portions of the Iranian leadership (Mullahs and their Republican Guard) started going back down the whole "martyrdom" route, suggesting that they would rather die than give in to the demands of the allied forces. While this is all very exciting for them, it is obvious that they are not just expecting to become martyrs for the cause themselves, but they expect many innocent Iranians who are not on board with their extreme religious causes should also be the ones who are sacrificed. It may be more accurate that their martyrdom is actually about other Iranians dying rather than them.

At the end of the day, many Iranians in leadership understand that they are under huge financial strain and that they cannot make it through a long acting blockade of their ports. They have already had to back off other non-oil exports due to facilities and other shipping methods being damaged from the war. Without a flow of oil sales, they will not be able to survive much longer. Estimates are that sometime between two weeks and a month the Iranians will run out of room to store oil and effectively will need to start to cap oil wells. This would be devastating.

Now, it is understandable that some Iranians will believe it is unfair for the US to blockade the Iranian ports while expecting the Iranians to allow the strait to otherwise remain open. So the options are to negotiate a real settlement that includes the Americans backing off their blockade efforts or to block the strait again assuming it will provide leverage for the United States to cave. This is a little like a game of chicken where two cars drive at each other hoping that the other one swerves. Only problem is that the US is driving a semi-truck and the Iranians are driving a scooter. If nobody swerves, only the Iranians really will be damaged by the crash. That being said, when there are Iranians who would rather die than swerve, you are not dealing with people who have a full deck. The problem is that going back to Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, etc.... they have all chosen to swerve because they didn't want to run over the scooter. I assume the Iranians just believe that it will happen again and I am not sure that their assumption is correct this time.