Middle East Insider · Issue 048 · Thursday, August 27, 2026

The Corridor That Isn’t

Good morning. Tehran spent Wednesday announcing a Hormuz corridor deal; a senior Iranian source told Reuters no deal is final, a source briefed on the talks says Oman refuses to charge ships a fee, and a naval advisory issued this morning reports a tanker hit by a projectile near Khasab, on fire and then extinguished, the third strike on shipping in a week. Qatar’s prime minister lands in Tehran today to mediate. The same regime’s state television aired a program on killing the President’s youngest son, and a US law-enforcement source says the foiled Florida assassination plot targeted Yair Netanyahu. Damascus says its Israel talks will resume, Turkey has shelved its Syrian air-base bid for now, and the Kurds’ integration terms are on paper at last. All of it below, plus the Forum’s six new pieces. A second edition follows this afternoon: the Western front.

This is the morning brief: the war as it stands on the map. A second edition follows this afternoon and leaves the map for the Western front: the economic campaign’s second week, Iran’s hand inside American water systems, the Islamist influence file from the Girl Scouts to a Washington conference, and the Michigan Senate race. Yesterday’s two editions, Economic D-Day and The Mailbag, Vol. III, are live.

The fall briefings begin Tuesday in Boston. Dates, cities, and seating are in the events card at the bottom of this brief.

Tehran announces a deal. Oman and the sea disagree.

The corridor this newsletter called the racket formalized spent Wednesday coming apart in public. IRGC spokesman Hossein Mohebbi declared on state media that “agreements have been reached regarding the share of each country in the waters of the Strait and the share of Iran and Oman in its revenues,” blamed American obstruction, and added the threat that carries the whole scheme: “If the United States does not accept our conditions, the Strait of Hormuz will not be opened under any circumstances.” Hours later a senior Iranian source told Reuters the opposite: “An agreement with Oman over the Strait of Hormuz has not been finalised” (Reuters). A source briefed on the talks put the gap plainly to the Jerusalem Post: “The Omanis say they will not agree to imposing fees on ships, while the Iranians continue to insist that, from their perspective, this is a condition for passage through the strait,” and Muscat disputes that the mine-clearing project Tehran announced was ever agreed (JPost). Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi added the clause that gives away the design: if the understanding becomes binding, “no military vessel will be permitted to pass through the Strait of Hormuz… No military vessel at all.”

The sea supplied the counterargument. A UKMTO advisory issued this morning, numbered 121-26 and classified as an attack, reports that a tanker was “hit by an unknown projectile causing fire to the vessel” near Khasab, Oman, on Tuesday night; the fire is out and the crew is safe (UKMTO, Maritime Executive). A maritime-security analyst identified the victim as a Kuwaiti tanker. It is the third strike on commercial shipping in a week, after Monday night’s projectile disabled a tanker’s engine room off Oman. Traffic tells the same story: five commodity vessels crossed the strait on Tuesday, against a ten-day average of fifteen and 130 to 140 a day before the war (CNBC). President Trump held his ground on both fronts Wednesday: the strait “is already open” as far as American clearance operations are concerned, and on talks with Tehran, “no time schedule, none.”

Into this gap flies the mediator. Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani lands in Tehran today, his first visit since the war began on February 28, seeking, in his ministry’s words, to “de-escalate tensions” and “create the conditions conducive to dialogue,” with the strait’s return “to the status quo prior to February 28” on the table (The National, Al-Monitor). He arrives representing a state Iranian missiles have struck three times this year. Three facts now sit in one file: Tehran claims a deal, its partner denies one exists, and a tanker burned in the meantime.

The Hormuz Mandate reads Wednesday in one line: an international strait is not Iran’s to administer, and a “temporary corridor” whose fees, gates, and permissions sit in Tehran is the toll booth this newsletter has tracked since June, under a new name. Oman’s refusal on fees matters because even the mediating state will not co-sign the extortion; the IRGC’s “will not be opened under any circumstances” matters because it is the confession, on the record, that the closure is policy rather than war damage. Washington’s position has held without a concession: mines cleared, clearance operations running, no schedule for talks, and credit to the President for keeping it that way while a partner government carries messages. The Reciprocity Standard sets the only corridor terms worth having: passage returns when the shooting stops, not when the revenue split is agreed. And the standing conclusion does not move. A regime that prices safe passage while its state television programs the murder of an American student is not a counterparty; it is the argument. The permanent guarantee is the end of this regime, the Iranian people are the most underused weapon against it, and the next phase should be Israel-led and non-kinetic while America holds the vise.

MEF Observer, Threatened by the Regional Conflict, Can Dubai Fight Back? (Aug 27): Radhika Lakshminarayanan, this morning, on the emirate absorbing the war’s shipping, fuel, and insurance costs, and the record that suggests it adapts: “Dubai repositioned itself as a versatile international destination and demonstrated an ability to turn each crisis into an economic inflection point.”

MEF Observer, Is the United Arab Emirates’ Iran Trade Freeze Economic Shock or Strategic Pivot? (Aug 26): Umud Shokri on Abu Dhabi’s halt of all trade and financial transactions with Iran after intercepting two Iranian missiles: enforced literally, Tehran loses its most important regional trade and payments hub, 30.6 percent of its merchandise imports and $21 billion in 2024.

MEF Online, Jordan’s China Pivot Creates a New Security Risk for Israel (Aug 26): Amine Ayoub on King Abdullah’s Beijing summit: hedging rather than realignment, but Chinese digital and physical infrastructure near the Jordan Valley opens intelligence and cyber exposure on Israel’s eastern frontier.

MEF Observer, Middle East Tolerance Requires Attention to Pre-Islamic Past (Aug 26): Michael Rubin, from two years of conversations with educators from Libya to Oman: “The Arabism that has dominated for decades has deprived a younger generation of the mosaic that Middle Eastern and North African countries once took for granted.”

MEF Observer, Is Washington Ready for Another Ethiopia-Eritrea War? (Aug 25): Blen M. Diriba tracks the 1997-98 pre-war pattern reassembling on the Horn while Washington defaults to after-the-fact mediation; a preventable crisis is acquiring “the momentum of a war.”

MEF Online, Death and Sex in Palestine (Aug 25): Hussein Aboubakr Mansour’s essay on how martyrdom culture ritualized and stylized death into a reproducible language of mobilization, drawn from his Egyptian childhood during the Second Intifada.

Forum in the news. Mosaic made the Forum’s reading of the Abu al-Duhur strike its editors’ pick this week: Israel is succeeding at keeping Turkey out of Syria, but it cannot risk a war to do it. World Israel News republished the Forum’s Site 99, Forward Deterrence, and regime-collapse analyses this week. The Forum’s new Western-front work, from Ceuta’s jihadist file to a Turkish spy cell in Cologne, headlines this afternoon’s edition.

New reader? The frameworks in every MEF Take live in the Field Guide. Every Forum donor receives Insider Premium with our compliments; if your invitation has not arrived, write [email protected].

The target list reaches the families.

The plots against the sons. Prime Minister Netanyahu said it first, on Channel 14 Monday: “Iran targeted one of my sons. Iran tried to kill, to murder one of my sons.” On Wednesday a US law-enforcement source told Newsmax which son: Yair Netanyahu, 35, living in Hallandale Beach, Florida, with Iranian operatives on the ground in the Miami area conducting surveillance before Israeli intelligence caught the plot in December; he left for Israel without his belongings (Israel Hayom, JPost). Neither American nor Israeli authorities have confirmed the identification. What is confirmed sits on the other side of the same file: Iranian state television’s Channel 3 aired a program titled “Where and how should we kill Barron Trump?”, claiming surveillance of the President’s 20-year-old son and a $10 million bounty, and the Secret Service says it “investigates anything that can be perceived as a threat toward our protectees” (Reuters). A July regime video closed with “Barron Trump, wait for us!”, and the billboards in Tehran’s Palestine Square carry the President’s whole family. A state that advertises the murder of students on its own airwaves has stopped pretending its quarrel is with governments.

The rial, the law, and the unity sermon. The rial traded Thursday at about 2,023,000 to the dollar on the open-market trackers, a step past the record set Monday as the Treasury campaign opened (tracker, Time). Against that backdrop the regime worked both of its audiences. For the Muslim world, President Pezeshkian told the Islamic Unity Conference in Tehran this morning that Iran “is not in a weak position and it knows how to defend itself,” and called for unity across “differences” (Dawn), while atomic-energy chief Mohammad Eslami told state media Wednesday the nuclear industry now runs on a par with the world’s leading countries. For its own people, the parliament’s foreign-media bill moved again this week, and the Guardian’s reporting Wednesday put its reach on the record: interviews with US or Israeli-funded outlets would draw six months to two years, foreign-directed policy proposals up to thirty years, with the Intelligence Ministry and IRGC intelligence assigned to investigate; the Center for Human Rights in Iran calls it an attempt “to sever the entire Iranian society from the rest of the world by criminalising the free flow of information itself” (Guardian). The bill still needs article-by-article passage and Guardian Council approval, and Pezeshkian’s own government formally opposes it. Unity abroad, silence at home: the regime’s two products, priced in the same currency its people no longer trust.

What the war has cost the other side of the file. NBC News reports that Iranian strikes have done billions of dollars in damage to roughly twenty US government sites across eight countries since February, including the CIA’s Riyadh station, with more than 2,000 munitions fired and Congress moving emergency funds for reconstruction (NBC). The figures are Tehran’s case against a pause, not for one: a regime this committed to attriting American infrastructure recovers whatever leverage a freeze leaves on the table. The blockade and the financial offensive exist because the alternative was letting it rebuild.

Damascus extends a hand. Ankara tests a line.

Al-Shaibani says the talks come back. Days after the Israeli strike on Abu al-Duhur, Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani sat for a Reuters interview and opened the door he had just slammed: “I believe negotiations will resume soon.” The rest of the interview is the sound of a government negotiating in public: “We believe there should be contact, especially with a party that constantly threatens the security of Syria… We do not trust Israel currently”; “The U.S. is trying continuously to put pressure on Israel to return to the dialogue table”; the talks froze at the start of the Iran war; no date is set; and the two sides had agreed on paper to “almost everything” around the start of the year, southern security zones included (Reuters). The channel is already warm: Damascus confirmed US-mediated talks in Jordan on Sunday, where al-Shaibani met Mossad chief Roman Gofman (Reuters). His claim that Israeli force “hasn’t succeeded” in buying security deserves its own answer: the force is the reason Damascus is at the table describing a historic opportunity.

The strike that drew the line, and the retreat that followed. The Abu al-Duhur strike, eight munitions on the Idlib base’s runway and storage the night of August 17-18, a day after a Turkish delegation toured it, was the first Israeli strike justified openly as blocking a Turkish military deployment in Syria. Ten days on, Israeli officials believe it worked: Israel assesses Turkey has abandoned the base bid “for now,” and officials say the IDF “will not hesitate to strike the base again” (Times of Israel). Defense Minister Katz spent the week saying the quiet part with attribution: Erdogan “is dragging Turkey into dangerous adventures in Syria… Erdogan would be better off continuing to deliver empty, fantastical speeches against Israel in the Turkish parliament rather than testing Israel’s determination to defend itself,” and, on the US envoy’s criticism, “Barrack’s response is full of inaccuracies… Erdogan was caught with his hand in the cookie jar and was forced to retreat” (Israel Hayom). Italy’s ANSA carried the exchange to European readers with the Forum’s Amine Ayoub supplying the frame: Erdogan’s Turkey has become a “political, logistical and financial sanctuary” for Hamas’s leadership (ANSA). Former national security adviser Meir Ben Shabbat, in Israel Hayom Wednesday, named what the strike interrupted: Turkey “has expanded from local control in the country’s north into wall-to-wall influence over the entire state.”

How deep the grip already runs. Israel Hayom’s reporting from Syria describes Turkish intelligence and military officials “playing in Syria as if it were their private playground”: armored Turkish vehicles on the roads around Latakia and Tartus, and Syrian agents brokering real-estate purchases for Turkish businessmen in the coastal cities, while the Syrian Observatory reports Turkish outposts in the northeast reinforced with blast walls and trenches rather than dismantled (Israel Hayom). FDD adds the balance sheet: Turkish firms Kalyon and Cengiz inside a $7 billion power consortium, a roughly $4 billion Damascus airport redevelopment, and a promoted revival of the Hejaz Railway as a Turkey-to-Gulf corridor (FDD). Mosaic’s editors made the Forum’s reading of this file their pick of the week: Israel is succeeding at keeping Turkey’s army out of Syria, and the discipline is in doing it without a war against a NATO member.

The pact grows a waiting list. Iranian parliamentary media claims Tehran has received an invitation to join the Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani Mecca Pact, a report no signatory has confirmed (JPost, Media Line). Turkey’s foreign minister says Egypt joins next once “a few technical matters” are implemented (Ynet). The sharpest reading so far comes from CFR’s Steven Cook: the pact’s Article 5-style commitments “were tested only forty-eight hours after the signing ceremony” when the Houthis struck Saudi Aramco’s Jazan refinery, and “Saudi leaders did not call on their new partners for help.” His conclusion reaches further: “After five decades, it is no longer possible to talk about a U.S.-led order in the Middle East” (CFR). The Forum’s file answers on two points: a guarantee nobody invokes is a communique, not an alliance, and a bloc built around NATO’s second-largest army, shopping for members from Cairo to Tehran, is a problem Jerusalem and Washington should price now rather than later. Sirwan Kajjo’s case against Syrian membership ran here yesterday.

The northern interdiction file. Lebanon’s army announced Wednesday it arrested a Syrian national at Aiha, on the Rashaya stretch of the Syrian border, moving “a quantity of rockets” into Lebanon; the cargo is seized and the recipient officially unconfirmed (L’Orient-Le Jour, JPost). The customer list for rockets in Lebanon is short. This morning Hezbollah supplied the reminder, launching two explosive-laden drones toward IDF positions in the south, per Lebanese reporting the IDF has not addressed, while Israeli officials describe more than 400 Hezbollah infrastructure targets destroyed in recent weeks (Times of Israel). The Carthage Doctrine keeps this file open: a militia that is rearming through the Bekaa is not disarming through the committees.

Fewer flags in Kiryat Gat, and a warning at the Council.

The support-center squeeze widens. A day after the Dutch expulsion, the Financial Times reports Israel discussed in recent weeks removing British officials from the International Gaza Support Center in Kiryat Gat, the US-led hub of roughly fifty countries and organizations running the ceasefire’s civilian side, with Germany and Italy also raised in the deliberations; an Israeli official told the paper “Israel has good relations with Germany and Italy,” an Italian official dismissed the idea, and the trigger for the British file is London’s weighing of trade restrictions on settlement goods (JPost, Times of Israel). Spain went earlier this year; the Netherlands went Tuesday. The policy now has a track record: participation in Gaza’s machinery is priced, and governments that sanction Israel pay in access. Reciprocity applied to allies is uncomfortable and it is working; the discipline is to spend it on conduct that matters, not on every irritant.

Mladenov tells the Council the truce is failing both ways. Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace’s High Representative for Gaza, briefed the UN Security Council Wednesday and spared nobody. On Israel’s strikes: “Will another strike on a munitions depot stop Hamas from rearming or tightening its grip on Gaza?… It will not.” On Hamas: “Every weapon carried, every tunnel still worked on, and every convoy still obstructed, sets the process back,” and the price falls on “Palestinian civilians, women and children.” On the stakes: a collapse would be “a point of no return for everyone,” because “ceasefires that deliver nothing visible are not sustained by patience; they are only exhausted by it” (JPost, Times of Israel). Buried in the criticism was the concession that matters: Hamas and the factions have agreed, for the first time, to hand over their weapons and full governing authority. That sentence is the whole test. The Forum’s position has not moved since the framework was signed: the deadline on disarmament is the ceasefire; everything else is commentary.

Sinwar’s bodyguard, located. The IDF and Shin Bet announced this morning that strikes in the Khan Yunis area earlier this week killed Razek Abu Shahma, a Nukhba operative who stormed the Re’im base on October 7 and later served as a bodyguard to Yahya Sinwar before Sinwar’s death, and Hazem Mousa, another Re’im infiltrator; the two, per the statement, “were advancing terror attacks against IDF troops and Israeli civilians while also attempting to rebuild Hamas’ capabilities” (JPost, Times of Israel). Twenty-two months after October 7, the men who were inside the wire that morning are still being found one by one. The intelligence file on Gaza’s remaining command structure stays open, and current.

The UNRWA week continues: one hundred referrals. USAID’s inspector general announced Wednesday it has referred more than one hundred current or former UNRWA staff to the State Department for suspension or debarment over participation in October 7 or Hamas affiliation, and that three former UNRWA teachers were just proposed for debarment: one a Deir al-Balah Battalion operative who allegedly helped abduct hostages, one a Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative who allegedly crossed into Israel on October 7, and one who allegedly held hostages (JPost). Debarment bars them from US-funded work; it is not a sanctions designation, and the distinction matters for what comes next: the sanctions case is still there to be made. It lands beside the Qalandiya compound takeover, which UNRWA calls an “unauthorised and deeply concerning incursion” and the Secretary-General condemned “in the strongest terms,” while Ben-Gvir answered, “Thank God, on my shift there is no Unrwa” (BBC). The UNRWA Sunset framework holds both halves of the week in one hand: the agency’s staff file vindicates the dismantlement case better than any raid does.

The West Bank’s warning file. Senior security officials told Ynet Wednesday the territory is “highly volatile”: more than 800 nationalist-crime incidents by Israeli extremists so far in 2026, 90 to 100 of them classified serious, the highest pace since 2023, with one official warning “At the current pace, we will surpass the 2023 record” and another placing the risk “just before the holidays and the elections” (Ynet). Central Command’s Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth reportedly told the prime minister “there is one match that could ignite everything in an instant: nationalist crime” (Times of Israel). At Qusra, where settlers blockaded a Palestinian-American family’s homes, troops moved against the outpost Wednesday, faced rioting, and returned Thursday morning (CBS). The house position stands: the camps doctrine against Palestinian terrorism and the handcuffs for Jewish vigilantes are the same policy, defending the same map. Twenty-five battalions hold the territory; the number that decides September is the one in Bluth’s warning.

Gaza’s land file, read honestly. A Guardian report from Gaza’s farms Wednesday carries the UN food agency’s new assessment: only about a quarter of prewar cropland is accessible at all, and roughly 3 percent, some 450 hectares, is undamaged and ready to cultivate, with 80 percent of greenhouses ruined (Guardian). Separately, Palestinian prisoners’ organizations said Wednesday, in a statement carried by WAFA, that Israel holds the remains of 799 identified Palestinians (UNA); Israel has long treated remains as leverage in the negotiations that returned its own dead. Both files argue the same conclusion from opposite directions: every month the disarmament phase slips, the civilian bill compounds, and the men who embedded a war machine in the farmland send someone else to pay it.

Integration’s small print, from Qamishli to Yanbu.

What the SDF actually signed. The dissolution announced Tuesday now has terms on paper, and analysts spent Wednesday reading them. Al-Monitor’s Amberin Zaman, under the headline “Capitulation or compromise?”, reports the force structure: about 5,000 fighters already folded into four Syrian army brigades under the January agreement, with at least 10,000 more, the all-female YPJ included, still unresolved, and a US push to seat Mazloum Abdi on Syria’s National Security Council blocked by al-Sharaa himself; envoy Tom Barrack called the day “absolutely historic,” while for Kurds who wanted Iraqi-style federalism “it felt like capitulation” (Al-Monitor). Reporting on the implementation terms describes brigades of roughly 1,300, the YPJ’s ~1,500 women routed to Interior Ministry counter-terror units rather than the army, northeastern oil revenues flowing to the state treasury, Kurdish recognized as an official language with Kurdish-language schooling preserved, Abdi as a presidential adviser, and Ilham Ahmed in the People’s Assembly (The National, The Amargi). Govern or Get Out is now a live experiment with named terms: Damascus asked for the whole state and got it, and every promise in the small print is checkable. The Forum will check.

The card that measured the week. Two days after Washington lifted the terror designation, al-Sharaa stood in an Old Damascus cafe beside his central bank governor and paid for coffee with a Visa card, the first live international card transaction in Syria in more than fifteen years; the foreign ministry released the video itself, captioned “Will that be cash or credit, Mr. President?” (Euronews). Visa confirmed the test transaction, run with a Lebanese acquiring bank under its December agreement with the central bank, and Governor Raslan called it “a historic step that restores the country to its natural place in the global economic system” (Visa, The National). The theater is the point, and so is the leverage: every rail that reconnects Damascus to the world is a rail Washington can still switch off. The Reciprocity Standard puts it in one sentence: the card works while the conduct holds.

Yanbu’s night shift. In the early hours of this morning, the Greek Patriot battery deployed in Saudi Arabia since 2021 engaged a drone swarm in the wider Yanbu region on the Red Sea coast, firing three interceptors in coordination with Saudi air defenses, per Greek security sources cited by Reuters; Greek reporting says all three targets were downed and attributes the drones to the Houthis, the battery’s third combat engagement since the war began (JPost, Greek City Times). File it under the Accords Logic: the kingdom’s refining coast is defended this morning by a European ally’s battery, a division of labor that exists because the normalization bloc built habits the Mecca Pact has yet to demonstrate.

North Africa’s hard week. Algeria recorded its worst fire day of the season Wednesday: 12 dead, five of them in Jijel, four in Bejaia, three in Tizi Ouzou, per the interior minister, with 54 burn-injured and 154 vegetation fires nationwide in a single day (Gulf News). In Tunisia, Ben Guerdane buried eight of its dead Wednesday after a boat carrying fifteen people, fourteen of them from the town, sank off Zarzis on its way to Italy; one man survived two days in the water, and the funerals followed two nights of protests (Africanews). A mourner named the cause plainly: “They embarked on the road to death… because of the miserable conditions they were living in.” States that cannot put out fires or employ their young men export instability northward; Europe’s migration debate, Ceuta included, begins on these coasts. This afternoon’s edition carries the Forum’s new Ceuta file.

Azerbaijan walks the wire. The Media Line’s new analysis names the balancing act on Israel’s northern supply line: Baku manages Israeli arms cooperation at what one analyst calls “an all-time high,” a March drone strike from Iranian territory on Nakhchivan that wounded four, and the Turkish-run oil transit that feeds Ceyhan, with the BTC pipeline now operated by Azerbaijan’s own SOCAR; as the analyst put it, “Azerbaijan is not going to give up on Israel, Azerbaijan is not going to give up on Turkey, because these countries are equally important to our security” (The Media Line). The No-Vacuum Doctrine watches this file for one reason: the corridor between Israel, Turkey, and Iran’s northwest border is exactly the ground a distracted Washington forfeits.

Commodity vessels that crossed the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, against a ten-day average of fifteen and 130 to 140 a day before the war (Kpler, via CNBC). Tehran is selling the world a corridor. This is the strait it actually runs: five ships, a burning tanker, and a fee no one but the regime has agreed to.

The fall briefings begin Tuesday. Three lunches, three fronts of the same war:

Boston · Tuesday, September 1: Bankrupt the Revolution: The Money War Against Tehran. Five days out, with the Treasury’s offensive in its second week: the ghost fleet, the front companies, the crypto rails, and the boycott-and-divestment campaign the Forum is building to close them.

Philadelphia · Thursday, September 3: Finish the Job: What Victory over Iran Requires. The munitions spent, the production race, the case for hunting the archer rather than the arrows, and the choice between finishing the war and freezing it.

New York · Wednesday, September 9: The Tentacles of the Outlaws: Iran’s Reach into American Life. The movement’s American franchise, and the Four D’s answer: defund, designate, debar, and force the patrons into daylight.

All briefings run 12:00 to 1:30 p.m. Seating follows annual giving: donors of $500 or more attend one event, $1,000 or more three events, $5,000 or more all events gratis; $125 per additional seat. To host an evening on the tour, write Nikki Ellis ([email protected]) and me ([email protected]). More cities and speakers to be announced.

Corrections Desk. Two verification notes from production, in the open. A widely circulated claim that the IDF “doubled” its West Bank force does not survive contact with the record: two battalions were added in July, and the news this week is the 800-incident warning, printed above. And Washington’s move against former UNRWA staff is a set of debarment referrals by USAID’s inspector general, not sanctions; the item names the difference because the difference is the remaining leverage. If today’s brief earns a case, reply; the desk reads everything.

Forward this brief to one person who still calls the Hormuz closure a market story. The Forum reads the naval advisories, the Farsi press, and the Damascus small print every morning; if you want that desk funded, support the work directly, and if you are near Boston on Tuesday, the money war is the subject at lunch.

Reply and tell me: should Washington entertain any corridor whose gates sit in Iranian waters, or hold the blockade absolute until the shooting stops, whatever Muscat brokers? I read every answer. The Western front follows this afternoon.