Iranian Strike Forces Partial Shutdown of Haifa Oil Refinery
No podcasts today. I traveled from Florida to Tennessee to attend Robert Barnes’ 1776 LAW CENTER CONVENTION , where I will be speaking along with Daniel Davis, Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou, among others. I did find an excellent Pub: Hair of the Dog. You can smoke cigars, eat great food and drink a pint for $2.50. Pretty reasonable.
Anyway, on to the latest developments. CBS News reported today (Friday, July 31, updated at 7:38 pm EDT) that the US and Israel are planning what would be one of the harshest bombing campaigns to date against energy infrastructure targets in Iran, with strikes possible throughout the weekend, per multiple sources.
According to CBS, the target set is energy infrastructure — marking a shift from the military and coastal targets of the earlier strike cycles. CBS reported the US is considering striking energy infrastructure including oil refineries and power plants, which would mark a significant change in the target set. It also would trigger a potentially devastating counter-strike by Iran on the refineries and power plants of the Persian Gulf arabs.
CBS reports that the Israelis have been notified and are coordinating with the United States, according to multiple US sources — and note the significance, since this would involve the Israeli military for the first time in many weeks, an escalation that would likely trigger Iranian missile attacks on Israel in response.
As I write this it is morning in Iran and there are no reports of any strikes… At least not yet. CBS indicated that the president has not given the final “go” order for the strikes. Axios corroborates: a US official said Trump is seriously considering the attacks within days but hasn’t given final orders,
The most telling detail is that the timing for an attack is being set by markets, not the battlefield. According to CHX, there was discussion about trying to conclude the strikes before financial markets open Monday, out of concern for how the bombings will affect the US and global economy, though no firm endpoint was locked in. That’s the piece most relevant to whether Trump will order the attack… he is trying to compress a strike on Iranian energy infrastructure into a weekend window specifically to get ahead of the oil-price and market reaction — which is an implicit admission of how severe they expect the energy-market fallout to be.
The proposed attack was discussed at a Cabinet meeting that Trump held Friday at Camp David… and CBS wasn’t alone — CBS News and the Wall Street Journal first reported the potential strikes, with the WSJ framing it as Trump having ordered strikes to force Iran to “surrender,” and Trump saying at the Cabinet meeting “We’ll be hitting them very hard… at some point they’ll say we just can’t take it anymore.” So the CBS energy-infrastructure reporting is corroborated by WSJ and Axios — this isn’t single-sourced.
If Trump decides to strike Iranian refineries and power plants, this escalation will directly threaten the crude-export and refining picture I have discussed in previous pieces. Iran’s own refining and its export terminals (Kharg being the critical node) are the assets in question — and a strike there, stacked on the Hormuz throttling and the Houthi Bab el-Mandeb blockade, presents a three-way squeeze on supply. The market-timing detail in the CBS report tells you the planners know it.
This is developing tonight and the final order hasn’t been given, so it may change quickly. I will try to update during the day on Saturday.
---
I thank you for your invaluable support by taking time to read or comment. I do not charge a subscription fee nor do I accept advertising. I want the content to be accessible to everyone interested in the issues I am discussing. However, if you wish to make a donation, please see this link .
Trump Mulls Strikes on Iran’s Oil and Power Infrastructure
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at Sonar21.