Larry Johnson thinks he’s figured out why the President and Pentagon called off this weekend’s expected attacks on Iran:
The New York Times published a piece by Eric Schmitt and Jonathan Swan that offers one explanation for Trump’s latest TACO. They write:
President Trump has set aside, at least for now, plans to sharply escalate the American military assault against Iran, with particular concern that intensifying the war could dangerously drain the Pentagon’s already diminished stockpile of Patriot antimissile interceptors and other air defense munitions in the Middle East.
The threat to interceptor stockpiles is one of many considerations that has made a return to major combat operations a hugely risky endeavor, administration officials say. Mr. Trump and his top aides are also uneasy about the prospect of a widening war in the Middle East, the alienation of key Gulf allies who are vulnerable to Iranian attack, a global economic crunch, and growing energy and refugee crises.
But there may be another consideration — one that does not exclude the reasons offered by the NY Times reporters — that involves the US fuel supplies. An economic brief prepared by Karl Miller investigates how the US military’s covert fuel procurement and export operations are depleting the nation’s diesel and jet fuel reserves, particularly during a period when domestic stocks are already critically low. The report details that from May to July, nearly 161 million barrels of distillate and jet fuel were exported, with the East Coast’s buffer falling to less than half its pre-pandemic norm. Much of this fuel is routed through opaque channels, such as the Rotterdam transshipment hub, where the final military or foreign allocation is not publicly reconciled, leaving the American economy exposed to shortage risks while military and foreign operations receive priority access.
A central finding is that the US government operates a parallel, largely unauditable military allocation system that siphons fuel from the civilian market. Public data merges commercial and military fuel categories, and certain military shipments are exempt from standard export reporting, making it impossible to track the true end-use of exported fuel. The report highlights that US taxpayers are subsidizing foreign military fuel needs, notably for Israel, through both direct and likely indirect channels, while the government does not disclose the full extent or funding split of these deliveries. Meanwhile, critical sectors like trucking, agriculture, and civil aviation are left with a diminished safety margin and increased disruption risk.
Miller concludes that the crisis is not due to a collapse in refinery output or a fabricated inventory, but rather a combination of structurally low inventories, high ongoing exports, and fragmented public reporting that obscures the military’s draw on national fuel supplies.
Americans are already angry about being forced to go to war again for Israel. And I suspect that even the great champions of antisemitism recognize that if they are deprived of their ability to drive as the economy gets further hammered by this insane, unnecessary, and ill-fated war, no amount of rhetoric, propaganda, and legal pressure is going to keep a lid on all that irrational, totally unprovoked hate.