US's Latest "Project Freedom" Boondoggle Sinks in Less Than a Day
The carnival is in its last season, and it’s beginning to show its age, appearing at times both erratic and woefully rehearsed to exasperated audiences.
The latest spectacle saw Trump launch an ill-fated and ill-planned ‘Project Freedom’, a kind of freedom of navigation gimmick in Hormuz, which immediately flopped hours later when US destroyers attempting to cross the strait were targeted by Iran.
The entire charade was particularly confused: for instance, the US official “guidance” for this bizarro stunt essentially told daring vessels to “chance it” through Omani territorial waters in the hopes it would avoid Iranian strikes.
This was a desperate US ploy, used before, to try and give the strait an appearance of being “opened” by begging commercial traffic to volunteer as guinea pigs and meatshields-in-one in the hopes that nothing is hit.
Unfortunately, a major oil tanker was immediately hit precisely near Omani waters, and the Project Freedom boondoggle instantly toppled like a used stack of dollar-store toilet paper rolls.
Trump likewise proceeded to fold like a two-shekel suit to riotous international laughter:
With Rubio announcing the end of Operation Epic Fury:
Trump’s most sycophantic media arschleckers plunged into Defcon 1-levels of damage control, floating desperate excuses for the flop. The most comical was Jesse Watters’ cerebral take:
Fox Host Jesse Watters suggests Trump’s pausing of Project Freedom is due to Trump not wanting Iran to be humiliated so they can surrender
“The President must know what he’s doing”
The full statement, if you need a belly-laugh:
“We suspect the president is letting the Iranians save face. The enemy just yesterday said they control the Strait - that was obviously a lie. And watching the Americans escort ship after ship out of the Gulf, and them not being able to do anything about that, was gonna be humiliating. Not only were they going to lose whatever military prestige they had left in the region - their negotiators weren’t going to be able to fight for their position after they lost their last bargaining chip. The commander in chief must believe that the Iranians are serious about surrendering, if he’s gonna pause (*stutters) Project Freedom for the sake of the deal. Because you could also continue Project Freedom during the negotiations - you know, you do want to get these foreign ships moving - the president must know what he’s doing. And we’re about to find out, how insane in the brain the regime really is.
Imagine swallowing that?
Trump angled to save face with another threat that hit like a deflated whoopie-cushion:
The problem with his “successful blockade” theory is that it’s become increasingly apparent that Iran’s oil storage is no where near depleting. Just like figures for Iranian losses keep being “revised” down, the countdown for Iran’s storage keeps going up. Originally it was 12 days left, then 14, then 20, now up to 45:
Recall the 15 day prediction from April 21, and the new 25-30 day prediction from a top oil analyst:
New satellite photos corroborate, as Kharg Island was seen with a plethora of empty storage tanks remaining:
Satellites also picked up many new VLCCs getting loaded up:
Iranian experts explained that Iran is able to “reduce production without having difficulty with storage.”
“Iran can balance production, storage, export and domestic production in a way that doesn’t need to shut down oil wells… Iran’s petroleum industry won’t allow oil wells sit idle.”
One of the ways, as I understand it, is that Iran is able to shift ~2 million bpd production almost entirely toward domestic use, without needing to export much of it in order to weather the storm. That said, tankers continue to allegedly get through according to some reports, as a kind of ‘quiet’ or even unspoken deal between Iran and the US may have been in place to allow both sides to get a little PR breathing room for their domestic audiences.
Some unverified reports had claimed Iran let a couple tankers pass to give the US Navy escort credit, and in return the US turned a blind eye to some Iranian tankers slipping through its “impenetrable” blockade as well.
The economic costs—and otherwise—are continually adding up for the waffling US. Two US soldiers were reported “missing” off the coast of “Morocco”, but according to the White House the Golden Age is proceeding swimmingly:
Well, Russia too isn’t doing so bad, according to Bloomberg:
Russian federal budget revenues from oil sales reached a six-month high, Bloomberg reports
▪️707.1 billion rubles: Russia’s federal budget revenues from mineral extraction tax receipts in April. This is the highest level since October of last year. Total revenues from oil and gas sales amounted to 856 billion rubles, Bloomberg states.
▪️Russia is benefiting from the escalation of the conflict in the Middle East. The price of Urals crude, used to calculate the tax amount, stood at $77 per barrel in April. A year earlier, it was at $59
▪️Russian budget revenues in May will be calculated based on even higher Urals crude prices, around $95 per barrel
While outlets continue leaking the truth about US’s true impact on the Iranian nuclear program:
The Atlantic’s new piece praises Iran for its unexpected gumption—unexpected to whom, exactly, one wonders?
But what the piece highlights is that Iran was specifically able to steer the conflict to revolve around Iranian strengths.
Atlantic concludes:
Even in its diminished state, the Iranian military has managed to deter enemy ships and outmaneuver anti-air systems, maintaining that grip on the strait while costing the U.S. billions.
Although Trump insists that Iran has been completely destroyed and that the war is over, reality suggests otherwise. After two months of war with a superpower, Iran is in some respects outmatched: The U.S. said it bombed more than 13,000 targets during Operation Epic Fury. Yet Iran has refused to concede, even as hundreds of its own civilians have died and the rest have suffered from an economic crisis. U.S. efforts to fully degrade Iran’s defensive capacities may ultimately end up succeeding. But the longer Iran is able to inflict economic pain across the world, and the longer its depleted defensive capabilities hold, the more evidence its leaders have that it can continue to stand firm.
Well, this is why the most enterprising and intelligent folk read independent outlets like this one here, rather than zioshill-owned corporate lackey chambers like the Atlantic—because virtually everything being “discovered” by them just now was long known to us and expounded on here before the conflict even began.
The article points out Iran’s ability to steer the conflict asymmetrically towards its own strengths. This is interesting in light of a newly-uncovered video from the ‘90s showing the Iranian IRGC University preaching precisely that:
In the 1990s, at the IRGC University of Command and Staff, future commander Hossein Salami - now a martyr - taught a course on asymmetric warfare. He instructed officers on prolonging a conflict with the US by escalating economic costs and political instability. Even then, they were already plotting the downfall of the evil empire.
Now the administration of dejected-looking flunkies has been resigned to literally begging the UN to step in and “help” do what the US Navy has proven woefully incapable of—an unprecedented prestige-blow to the US military ‘machine’:
It’s only fitting then that when Iranian FM spokesman Esmail Baghaei was asked why Iran isn’t backing down in the face of the inimitable American “superpower”, this was his response:
Q: “Why Iran doesn’t back down when America is a superpower?”
Iran’s FM spokesperson Baghaei: “We are a superpower too.”
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I replied to an old post, where someone had kept asking about Iran's oil storage and the effect on the oil wells. This is a very recent video discussion and Krapivnik has more recent experience in the oil fields:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnNOL1sGhLs
Long story short, it's a totally made up concern (as I kept trying to explain to the other poster but he didn't get it for a while). . Oil wells don't work like what MSM was saying... and it also depends on the type of oil wells. And then the backstop is that Iran has already opened up multiple routes for its oil to keep flowing.. through the Caspian sea and utilizing Russian pipelines after that, land routes through Pakistan and some others etc. That's why the pictures of the Kharg island oil tanks being quite empty should not be a surprise. Iran is making bank by selling as much oil as it can.
Who hasn't been selling any oil? UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait. How come we didn't hear a peep of concern about their oil wells having to be shut? People pls... the western MSM is just lies piled upon lies now, often not able to keep even their stories straight.
As for the quid pro quo about Iran letting some tankers through.. Simplicius, that is total BS.
Please understand human nature... Iran does hold all the cards... they got bombed.. they've been sanctioned like heck, lost a lot of important figures, so they ain't playing the appeasement game anymore. Why in the world would they even put up with that pretense? It's just more western MSM made-up BS being fed as 'insider info'.
In the meantime, Iran has downed a MQ-9A surveillance drone, set up the Persian Gulf Strait Authority (PGSA) to manage the Strait of Hormuz and sent his Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi to China for a meeting with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi, ahead of Donald Trump's meeting with Xi Jinping - guess who is taking the spotlight!
https://geopolitiq.substack.com/p/trump-halts-project-freedom-while