W hy has nothing been done to reopen the Strait of Hormuz ? The answer is simple – as his advisers will have told Donald Trump before he attacked Iran , it is almost impossible to clear a passage through a minefield when the shoreline is held by the enemy, without being prepared to take significant casualties. And this, it seems, the US is not prepared to do. It is one thing to bomb a less technologically sophisticated enemy from the air, but quite another to get involved in a real fight at sea level with an opponent who has been planning this form of asymmetric warfare for a very long time . History gives a stark lesson on why America needs to tread warily – a page from the First World War . It was March 1915. The “straits” concerned were the Dardanelles – the narrow passage linking the Mediterranean to the Black Sea and giving access to Istanbul. The Turks were the defenders, the British and the French the attackers. They were in the middle of a shooting war.…