MIDDLE EAST - Most of the players in the Gulf, from Qatar to Saudi Arabia to Iran, share a desire to keep the game from getting out of control. Despite crushing sanctions, Iran knows that it would not benefit from a war. That’s why Tehran has often vehemently denied responsibility for the recent attacks on Western shipping in the strait. Yet to avoid escalation at the last minute, as President Donald Trump did when he rightly called off an attack on Iran in reaction to the downing of a US unmanned drone, is not enough.
Hormuz needs a steady guarantor of security, even an imperfect one. The Strait of Hormuz links the majority of the world’s people who live along the shores of Asia and East Africa to the heart of the Middle East. Long before the discovery of oil, it was the world’s carotid artery. Cut off the blood supply almost anywhere else and the world would adapt. Here, however, an interruption could be fatal: 90 percent of oil exported from the Gulf, about 20 percent of the world’s supply, passes through Hormuz.
Shipping through the strait, which is a mere 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest point, is concentrated and hazardous. In Musandam, the Omani exclave on the strait’s southern side, you can hear Persian radio from Iran as often as Arabic. Along the rocky shorelines, islets and peninsulas thrust precipitously into the sky. Heat, humidity, and a scorching wind make the climate inhospitable; many mountain ranges and valleys near Hormuz remain sparsely inhabited.
“Just what is an APOSTLE?”
Today we find the Church of God in a “wilderness of religious confusion!”
The confusion is not merely around the Church – within the religions of the world outside – but WITHIN the very heart of The True Church itself!
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