President Donald Trump has suggested that the Strait of Hormuz should be renamed after himself as attacks intensified between the US and Iran. Meanwhile, Iranian hackers have targeted critical American infrastructure with cyberattacks in recent weeks, a new report has claimed, as fresh strikes threatened to plunge Washington and Tehran back into all our war. Four sources with access to government and industry information about cyberthreats told NBC News that hackers are believed to have targeted US telecommunications, energy and other infrastructure.
Officials were said to be investigating Iran as the likely agent behind the attacks, per PBS. In an age of rogue law dominating international affairs since Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office and then staggered about the globe like a toddler with a chainsaw, it is inevitable that other outlaw nations, Russia and Iran, would see opportunity in mayhem. The 47th US president is too infantile, and misled by a messianic government in Israel, to comprehend that the citizens of Iran will not rise against their oppressors in Tehran under the Stars and Stripes and that Moscow will never be America’s friend.
But Iran's supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei (along with his Guardian Council), the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin are locking America into another forever war. Their long term intent is to expose the limits of current US power and to further weaken its influence across the Middle East, where the close alliance between Washington and Israel is a liability. Iranian border guards have seized a vessel with 382,000 litres of smuggled fuel in the northern Gulf, and arrested its foreign crew of 11, the state broadcaster IRIB reported on Wednesday, without giving the nationality of the detained.
Iran, which has some of the world's lowest fuel prices due to heavy subsidies and a sharp fall in the value of its national currency, has been seeking to curb widespread fuel smuggling by land to neighbouring countries and by sea to Gulf states. Donald Trump’s top White House aides are urgently pushing to prevent the Iran war from escalating, after the US ramped up the intensity of its attacks on Wednesday. The aides want to prevent the war escalating before November's midterm elections to stem Republican electoral losses, four sources told the news agency.
Officials will consider once again ramping up military action after the vote in November, but a return to the full-scale conflict is not a given, they said. "We are keeping the pressure on Iran," one White House official said. "But November is a priority." As we reported earlier, Saudi Arabian shipping company Bahri reported that two Filipino seafarers had been killed in a security incident in the Strait of Hormuz.
Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest crude exporter, has now confirmed that an Iranian attack on an oil tanker owned by its national shipping company killed the seafarers. Sidr, owned by Bahri, was one of two supertankers carrying Saudi oil reported to have been hit late on Monday while transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran has threatened tankers attempting to sail through the narrow waterway without authorisation, impeding energy exports from neighbouring oil-rich Gulf countries.
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