Energy Secretary Chris Wright was on ABC’s This Week Sept. 6 where he repeated President Trump’s fairy tales about Iran, especially the one about how the United States is winning the war, and Iran’s rulers are barely “clinging” to power. “I’m very proud of President Trump, not just kicking this can down the road like previous presidents have done, but saying we’ve got to end that capability,” Wright gushed. “We’ve got to reset the Middle East so it can have generations of peace and prosperity.”
Wright also repeated Trump’s formulation that Americans have to pay higher gasoline prices to ensure that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, not mentioning that the U.S. intelligence community has assessed since 2007 that Iran isn’t building one. Besides, he demurred: the futures markets are promising a 35-cent reduction in the price of gas by November. “So trust the market.”
Along the way he admitted there may not be a nuclear agreement. “It may be simply destroying their capabilities to do it. An agreement may await a next administration in Iran. We simply don’t know that,” he said.
He claimed that the flow of oil out of the Strait of Hormuz is 9 million barrels a day and when the oil flowing out via pipelines by Saudi Arabia and the UAE is added, it’s more like 13-14 million barrels a day. This is not verified.
In Tehran, Major General Mohsen Rezaei, the Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, confirmed that there is a U.S. operation to sneak ships through the Strait of Hormuz but whether it adds up to 9 million barrels a day, as Wright claimed, or not, is another question. He claimed that the strait is completely closed, stressing that non-compliant ships will be prevented by Iran from crossing again, reported Mehr News.
Rezaei further said that the Americans try to smuggle 5 to 6 vessels through by spending a lot of money, while these ships are usually struck. He asserted that Iran has not decided yet to sink those non-compliant ships so far.
