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Slate: Trump's Weak Case Against Iran
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/06/trump-iran-gulf-oman.html
If Iran did attack two tankers in the Gulf of Oman this week, as President Donald Trump claims, he’s doing a lousy job of making that case to the rest of the world.
The sad fact is he has to make a case because, in his 2½ years in office, he has told so many lies and alienated so many allies. If he decided to respond to the attacks with new economic pressure or military action, he would need the support of those allies, and to earn that support, he would need to present extraordinarily persuasive evidence of Iran’s culpability.
He has not yet produced that evidence. It was an egregious mistake to let Secretary of State Mike Pompeo make the initial accusation against Iran. First, Pompeo is on record as supporting regime change in Tehran; for him to come forth—instead of a more relevant figure, such as the secretary of defense or the director of national intelligence—infuses the charge with bias.
Second, the language Pompeo used was less than compelling. “It is the assessment by the United States government that the Islamic Republic of Iran is responsible for the attacks,” he said on Thursday. “The assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping, and the fact that no proxy group operating in the area has the sources and proficiency to act with such a high degree of sophistication.”
Among several things missing here is the level of confidence in the assessment. The omission is unusual and possibly, for that reason, telling. When U.S. intelligence agencies first analyzed the theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee in the spring of 2016, for example, they concluded with “high confidence” that Russia was the culprit. When chemical weapons were fired in Syria in April 2017, Trump’s secretary of state at the time, Rex Tillerson, said U.S. intelligence had “a very high level of confidence” that the weapon used was sarin nerve gas and that the attack was ordered by Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Then–Secretary of Defense James Mattis said that he’d personally reviewed the intelligence and had “no doubt” that the Syrian regime was responsible.
On Friday, the Pentagon released fuzzy video footage of sailors on a small boat removing an object from the side of a ship. Officials said that the small boat belonged to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the object was an unexploded mine, and the ship was one of the two tankers that were attacked. Maybe. We all await footage showing sailors from a similar boat placing a mine on the side of a tanker. The picture is further muddied by the fact that the Japanese owner of one of the tankers has since claimed that the hole in his ship was well above the water—beyond the reach of someone in a small boat.*
</snip>
If Iran did attack two tankers in the Gulf of Oman this week, as President Donald Trump claims, he’s doing a lousy job of making that case to the rest of the world.
The sad fact is he has to make a case because, in his 2½ years in office, he has told so many lies and alienated so many allies. If he decided to respond to the attacks with new economic pressure or military action, he would need the support of those allies, and to earn that support, he would need to present extraordinarily persuasive evidence of Iran’s culpability.
He has not yet produced that evidence. It was an egregious mistake to let Secretary of State Mike Pompeo make the initial accusation against Iran. First, Pompeo is on record as supporting regime change in Tehran; for him to come forth—instead of a more relevant figure, such as the secretary of defense or the director of national intelligence—infuses the charge with bias.
Second, the language Pompeo used was less than compelling. “It is the assessment by the United States government that the Islamic Republic of Iran is responsible for the attacks,” he said on Thursday. “The assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping, and the fact that no proxy group operating in the area has the sources and proficiency to act with such a high degree of sophistication.”
Among several things missing here is the level of confidence in the assessment. The omission is unusual and possibly, for that reason, telling. When U.S. intelligence agencies first analyzed the theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee in the spring of 2016, for example, they concluded with “high confidence” that Russia was the culprit. When chemical weapons were fired in Syria in April 2017, Trump’s secretary of state at the time, Rex Tillerson, said U.S. intelligence had “a very high level of confidence” that the weapon used was sarin nerve gas and that the attack was ordered by Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Then–Secretary of Defense James Mattis said that he’d personally reviewed the intelligence and had “no doubt” that the Syrian regime was responsible.
On Friday, the Pentagon released fuzzy video footage of sailors on a small boat removing an object from the side of a ship. Officials said that the small boat belonged to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the object was an unexploded mine, and the ship was one of the two tankers that were attacked. Maybe. We all await footage showing sailors from a similar boat placing a mine on the side of a tanker. The picture is further muddied by the fact that the Japanese owner of one of the tankers has since claimed that the hole in his ship was well above the water—beyond the reach of someone in a small boat.*
</snip>
And, again, WHY would Iran attack a Japanese tanker with Abe in Iran?? That makes zero sense!
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