Oil tanker attacks echo Persian Gulf's 1980s 'Tanker War'

Mysterious attacks on oil tankers near the strategic Strait of Hormuz this week show how one of the world's crucial chokepoints for global energy supplies can be easily targeted, 30 years after the US Navy and Iran were entangled in a similarly shadowy conflict called the "Tanker War."
"If the waters are becoming unsafe, the supply to the entire Western world could be at risk."
"Iran's strategy at sea particularly is based on disruption," said Dave DesRoches, a professor at the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University in Washington. "They know they can't dominate. They have to disrupt."

A recent billboard put up in Tehran's Vali-e-Asr Square shows U.S. and Israeli ships afire and sinking, with captions in English, Farsi, Arabic and Hebrew reading: "We Drowned Them All."
Around this time as well, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave an address to university students, who gave him a portrait of Nader Mahdavi, a Revolutionary Guard soldier killed in a U.S. attack amid the "Tanker War."