What We Don’t Know
By
The need for our President to have his ego bolstered is interfering with our ability to understand his war in Iran.
He lies all the time to soothe his battered ego and goose the markets. The markets have been very kind to him and not responded in the way some of us expected to the shortfalls of petroleum and fertilizer, at least not in the United States. I see small yelps of pain every now and then, most recently some application that was feeling a shortage of helium. The oil markets seem to have benefitted from China’s filling up its reserves before the war and then releasing them, along with other nations, but the reserves are going down. Additionally, the Ukrainians have decreased the total refining capacity by their campaign against Russia’s oil refineries, so there are not as many refineries to buy the oil that isn’t there because the Strait of Hormuz is closed. But that also means that the price of gasoline may go up even if the price of oil doesn’t.
The fictions therefore are maintaining in that area.
What is harder to explain and to keep out of the public eye is that the US keeps bombing Iran, and Iran isn’t folding the way Trump’s real estate rivals must have when he threatened them. It could be that Iran is trying to deplete our missile stock as Ukraine has been doing to Russia, by using cheap drones that our expensive missiles must shoot down.
Okay. So the word is that that isn’t happening, and it’s Biden’s fault anyway.
“Sources” tell us that Vice President Vance and Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine both told President Donald Trump that they had concerns about escalating the war. At least these two are brave truth-tellers who, they would like us to know, have nothing to do with the bad stuff that is happening. Mmm-kay!
The database of wounded and killed service members has been updated after an attempt to say no, those latest four weren’t killed because it’s a new war or they were the wrong color or something.
When the new Pentagon data is combined with updated totals for Operation Epic Fury, 18 troops have died and another 624 have been wounded since the US launched its war against Iran on Feb. 28. The number of wounded is a significant increase from the previous peak of 482 observed by CNN last week.
Trump hates the idea of admitting that he is killing people, while glorying in blowing things up. I haven’t seen this covered in a comprehensive way, although the New York Times had a photo analysis of damage to one of the US camps in the region last week. We don’t have a good overall idea of the damage that Iran is doing to our bases and to the other countries in the area. I think that Trump’s desire to feel that we are the only actors inflicting damage has a lot to do with this. The information is held closely by his sycophants.