An Act of War?
by digby
Oh my:
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused Iran on Wednesday of having carried out an “act of war” with aerial strikes on oil facilities in Saudi Arabia last weekend, and he said the United States was working to build a coalition to deter further attacks.
Mr. Pompeo’s words were the strongest so far from any American official regarding the attack on Saturday in Saudi Arabia, which severely impaired production at the leading oil exporter and raised fears that tensions between Iran and the United States could escalate into a new war.
Despite Mr. Pompeo’s statement, President Trump pushed back against another American military entanglement in the Middle East, speaking only of unspecified new sanctions on Iran.
Asked about a possible American attack on Iran, Mr. Trump told reporters in Los Angeles: “There are many options. There’s the ultimate option and there are options a lot less than that.”
In Saudi Arabia, military officials displayed what they described as physical evidence that Iran had been responsible for the attack, but did not specify how they intended to respond or what they expected from their American allies.
The Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have been fighting a Saudi-led coalition for more than four years, have said they were responsible for the attack. Iran, a strong ally of the Houthis, has denied any responsibility. American and Saudi officials have said the Houthis had neither the sophistication nor the weapons to have carried it out.
“This was an Iranian attack,” Mr. Pompeo said. “We were blessed there were no Americans killed in this attack, but anytime you have an act of war of this nature, there’s always a risk that could happen.”
Nobody knows what he's really talking about. He says he's in a "very powerful position" whatever that means.
But this is the heart of the problem. The chickens are coming home to roost. Having a pathological liar and incompetent boob for a president has a price.
For a president with a loose relationship with the facts and poisonous relationships with allies, the attack on the Saudi oil fields poses a challenge: how to prove the administration’s case that Iran was behind the strike and rally the world to respond.
President Trump must now confront that problem as he struggles with one of the most critical national security decisions of his presidency. Over the next few days or weeks, he will almost certainly face the reality that much of the world — angry at his tweets, tirades, untruths and accusations — could be disinclined to believe the arguments advanced by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others that Iran bears responsibility for the attack.
If Mr. Trump tries to gather a coalition to impose diplomatic penalties, tighten sanctions to further choke off Iranian oil exports or retaliate with a military or cyberstrike, he may discover that, like President George W. Bush heading into Iraq 16 years ago, he is largely alone.
Already, intelligence officials are hinting, in background conversations, that the evidence implicating Iran is just too delicate to make public. One theory gaining support among American officials is that the cruise missile and drone attack was launched from southwest Iran or in the waters nearby.
But the evidence gathered so far, one official said, “isn’t a slam-dunk,” deliberately using the phrase that George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director in 2003, came to regret when he employed it to argue, incorrectly it turned out, that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction.
After the bitter Iraq experience, it would be hard for any American president to persuade the country and its allies to take his word that it is time to risk another war in the Middle East, barring incontrovertible evidence that could be made public. For Mr. Trump, it could be an especially tough sell.
“Painfully, the word of the president will be suspect,” Wendy R. Sherman, who negotiated the details of the Iran deal for the Obama administration, said on Tuesday.
Mr. Trump’s “hyperbole and outright fabrications through a daily tweet diet,” she said, has left him with “little credibility with Congress, allies and partners, let alone the American people.”
“All will be challenged to accept a Trump assessment of what occurred in the attack on Saudi oil facilities,” she added.
[...]
Even if American and other experts who are now in Saudi Arabia to conduct a forensic study conclude that Iran built the drones or cruise missiles, they may have a hard time establishing — especially for the public — where the weapons were launched from, or who shot them toward the Saudi oil fields.
“A military response on the sovereign territory of Iran is a very serious matter,” Mr. Tillerson cautioned. “And not one that anyone should take with less than fully conclusive information.”
Pentagon officials appear to agree. That is why the options now being discussed include alternatives like retaliating against Iranian facilities outside of Iranian territory and conducting cyberstrikes. If the latter option were chosen, it would be akin to the cyberoperations that blew up Iran’s nuclear centrifuges a decade ago and the move to wipe out military databases several months ago, after the shooting down of an American drone by Iran.
The Saudis seem to sense the credibility problem.
Even they have not yet publicly followed Mr. Pompeo in accusing Iran of responsibility. In a statement on Monday, the Saudi government urged an international investigation, led by the United Nations, to determine responsibility.
That move, unusual for a country that disdains the United Nations almost as much as the Trump administration does, seemed an acknowledgment that the world would not take Mr. Trump’s word, nor that of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
Over the past year, the crown prince has encountered credibility problems of his own. He has repeatedly denied that he sent or had knowledge of the Saudi team that killed the Washington Post columnist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi. The evidence suggests otherwise.
For Mr. Trump, the suspicions about any American assessment of responsibility will be colored by another problem: European officials blame him, as much as the Iranians, for creating the circumstances that led to the attack.
In their telling, it was Mr. Trump’s decision, soon after he fired Mr. Tillerson, to abandon the 2015 nuclear deal that set in motion the events that culminated in the crippling of the two Saudi oil fields.
For the past 18 months, Mr. Trump has been steadily reimposing sanctions on Iran. At first, the Iranians largely ignored those steps and remained part of the four-year-old agreement that limited Iran’s nuclear ability in return for lifting most sanctions on the country.
But as the administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign took its toll, Iranian officials began breaking out of the accord’s limits — arguing they would not be bound by an agreement Mr. Trump had abandoned — and seizing oil tankers.
The European argument is that Mr. Trump has unnecessarily provoked the Iranians. That is why France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, is leading an effort to undermine the American sanctions by issuing a $15 billion line of credit to Iran, in hopes of getting them back in compliance with the deal to which France was a partner.
[...]
The next few days will be critical. Michael J. Morell, the former deputy director of the C.I.A., who briefed Mr. Bush on Sept. 11, 2001, said Mr. Trump will face a difficult trade-off.
After he gets the intelligence agency’s “best assessment on who was behind the attack,” Mr. Morell said, Mr. Trump “must then balance the need to protect sources and methods with the need to inform Congress and the American people about why he takes or doesn’t take any action.”
“The credibility of the United States matters every single day,” he added. “And when it is eroded in the eyes of our allies over time, it then ultimately makes moments like this even more difficult.”
Pompeo is an Iran hawk and could easily be maneuvering Trump into a war. His NSC adviser is also a hawk. So are most of the Republicans in congress. Wars tend to be good for incumbent president, at least in the bginning.
All the stars are aligned although Trump is the wild card who could pull back. But we just don't know. And that's scary.
David Leonhardt laid out the best and worse case scenarios for a possible Trump strategy:
The motivation for the attack still isn’t clear. One possibility is that hard-liners within Iran ordered or encouraged it, out of a desire to scuttle the upcoming negotiations, as The Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib explained. The hard-liners may have feared that Iran’s government was going to offer concessions — which would be a sign that Trump’s strategy might be working.
Another possibility, though, is that the Iranian government ordered it because it views Trump as a weak negotiator who is afraid of war. By escalating the situation, Iran may be betting that Trump will back down, as David Kirkpatrick and Farnaz Fassihi of The Times wrote. In that case, the combination of Trump’s tough sanctions and his generally chaotic foreign policy may have pushed the Middle East closer to war.
We'll see in the next few days.
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