Originally posted to The Guardian’s website, 17 September 2019
Donald Trump has said the US response to the attack on Saudi oil facilities will depend on the assessment in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, and downplayed US dependence on Middle East energy supplies.
The US secretaries of state and energy both explicitly blamed Iran for the attack. Unnamed US officials were also quoted in US media outlets as saying Iranian cruise missiles were used in Saturday’s attack on an oil field and processing plant. Estimates of the number of missiles used ranged from “nearly a dozen” to “over two dozen”.
But Trump suggested on Monday the US did not have definitive evidence, adding that he would send the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to Riyadh to investigate.
“We’re going to find out,” Trump said. “There are lots of different pieces to look at.”
Speaking in Baghdad late on Monday, the Nato chief, Jens Stoltenberg, said he was “extremely concerned about a risk of escalation” and called on all parties to prevent further attacks. He condemned Iran for stoking violence across the Middle East, saying: “Iran is supporting different terrorist groups and being responsible for destabilising the whole region.”
Iran has denied responsibility for the attack, and the country’s president appeared to endorse a claim of responsibility by Yemen’s Houthi rebel group.
Speaking in Ankara, Hassan Rouhani said: “Yemeni people are exercising their legitimate right of defence … the attacks were a reciprocal response to aggression against Yemen for years.”
Intelligence officials in the region said they believed drones or missiles were used in the attack, in what appeared to be a carefully aimed strike at the heart of the Saudi economy.
“There was hardly a more strategic target they could have hit,” said one official. “They’ve looked at the map and said: ‘Where could we cause most damage.’ These were the hubs of their production across the country. Those sending the drones well knew the address.”
In a tweet on Sunday, Trump declared the US was “locked and loaded”, but left it to the Saudi government to confirm Iranian involvement and the nature of the US reaction, in an apparent attempt to make the monarchy take full responsibility for any reprisal action.
Asked on Monday whether he had pledged to protect Saudi Arabia, the president told reporters: “No, I haven’t promised the Saudis that … We have to sit down with the Saudis and work something out.”
Later in the day, Trump stressed that if there were to be a retaliatory strike, Riyadh would have to play a leading role, especially when it came to paying for it.
“The fact is the Saudis are going to have a lot of involvement in this, if we decide to do something,” he told reporters. “They’ll be very much involved, and that includes payment. And they understand that fully.”
As to whether diplomacy with Iran had been exhausted, Trump said: “No, it’s never exhausted … You never know what’s going to happen … I know they want to make a deal … At some point it will work out.”
The Saudi military spokesman for the Riyadh-led coalition fighting in Yemen that Iranian-made weapons were used in the attack but stopped short of blaming Iran.
“The investigation is continuing and all indications are that weapons used in both attacks came from Iran,” Col Turki al-Maliki told reporters in Riyadh, according to the French press agency, AFP. He said the attacks had not been launched from Yemen and there was an investigation into “from where they were fired”.
Iraqi officials said that Pompeo told them that the attack was not carried out from Iraqi soil and instead appeared to be launched from neighbouring Iran.
Two aides to senior Iraqi leaders said Pompeo passed on to the claim in a phone call to the Iraqi prime minister, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, in the early hours of Monday. The call allayed mounting fears in Baghdad that an Iranian proxy force composed of Iraqis might have launched the drones believed to have carried out the devastating strike without the knowledge of the central government.
But the Wall Street Journal quoted Saudi officials as saying their US counterparts had not provided enough evidence to conclude definitively that the attack was launched from Iran.
On Monday, Trump stressed that it was Saudi Arabia not the US that had been attacked and played down the US national security interest in the Gulf, pointing to the fact that the US has become the world’s biggest energy producer.
“We don’t need Middle Eastern Oil & Gas, & in fact have very few tankers there, but will help our Allies!” the president tweeted.
A senior White House official – the vice-president’s chief of staff, Marc Short – argued that when the president had said the US was “locked and loaded”, it was a reference to the country’s self sufficiency in energy.
“I think that ‘locked and loaded’ is a broad term and talks about the realities that we’re all far safer and more secure domestically from energy independence,” Short said.
The remarks seemed to be aimed at keeping the president’s options open on a response to the attack, which knocked out half Saudi production, 5% of global production and triggered a spike in oil prices. But the administration also showed determination that the world held Iran responsible.
Like Pompeo, who accused Iran of responsibility for the attack on Saturday, the US energy secretary, Rick Perry, left no room for doubt about culpability.
“The United States wholeheartedly condemns Iran’s attacks on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and we call on other nations to do the same,” Perry said during a trip to Vienna.
Asked on CNBC what the response should be, Perry said: “I think there will be a coalition effort, both our friends in the Middle East that understand having a crazy neighbor is a real problem … [and] all those countries in that region should have the hair on the back of their necks standing up watching a country attack someone to manipulate the energy market.”
Speaking to the UN security council, Britain’s ambassador, Karen Pierce, said: “We are still assessing what happened and who is responsible for these attacks. Once this has been established, we will discuss with our allies and partners how to proceed in a responsible manner. We need a united international response to these despicable attacks.”
Link to the original post: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/16/iran-trump-saudi-arabia-oil-attack-assessment-latest
