Major Shaitan Singh
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TEHRAN A U.S. aircraft carrier had entered a zone near the Strait of Hormuz being used by the Iranian navy for wargames, an Iranian official said Thursday amid rising tensions over the key oil transit channel.
"A U.S. aircraft carrier was spotted inside the maneuver zone ... by a navy reconnaissance aircraft," Commodore Mahmoud MoU.S.avi, the spokesman for the 10-day-long Iranian exercises, told the official IRNA news agency, according to AFP.
The Iranian aircraft took video and photos of the U.S. vessel, he added. The vessel was believed to the U.S.S John C. Stennis, one of the U.S. Navy's biggest warships.
The U.S. maintains a navy presence in the Gulf in large part to ensure oil traffic there is unhindered.
Iranian Navy Admiral Habibollah Sayyari had repeated Wednesday that it would be "very easy" for the country's naval forces to shut down the strait, The Wall Street Journal reported.
A day earlier, first Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi, said in a speech to Iranian students that "not even a drop of oil will flow through the Persian Gulf" if Iran's oil is embargoed.
"If our enemies in the West start conspiring against U.S., we'll take strong action to put them in their place," he added.
The U.S., the European Union and key Arab states have intensified discU.S.sions in recent weeks about the possibility of imposing an embargo on oil purchases from Iran. The EU is currently deliberating laws blocking such purchases from the country.
U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to sign in the coming weeks new legislation preventing any bU.S.iness dealings with Iran's Central Bank, through which Tehran executes most of its oil sales. Congress passed the restrictions Dec. 15 as part of a bill authorizing more than $660 billion in defense spending over the next year.
Iran, the fourth largest producer of crude oil in the world, has previoU.S.ly threatened to close the strait, both during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2005. It has never carried out the threat.
Analysts say it is highly unlikely that Iran would attempt to close the strait becaU.S.e of the dire impact it would have on Iran's own economy -- from both import and export disruptions.
Both Iran's foreign ministry and its oil minister have said recently Iran has no intention of closing the strait, but the latest comments have sparked a reaction.
U.S. officials said that they don't necessarily consider the most recent threats more serioU.S. than previoU.S. ones, but that they were highly provocative.
"Any attempt to close the strait will not be tolerated," said George Little, the Pentagon press secretary, said Wednesday. "The strait is an economic lifeline for countries in the gulf, including Iran."
Little's comments were echoed by the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet, which said in a statement that any country that "threatens to disrupt freedom of navigation in an international strait is clearly outside the community of nations."
Brent crude Wednesday fell nearly $1.50 to $106.83, its lowest level in a week, in the hour after the Fifth Fleet said it wouldn't allow disruption of shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz
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They must judge their capabilities and other aspects related to going on war with US and its allies. 
Such a war could not only militarily destroy Iran but can cause massive damage to Iran's economy, which is doing quite well. 
