Despite the Trump administration’s increasingly strong claims that trouble is brewing in the Middle East, officials have provided little evidence to the American people about what they call “troubling, escalatory and dangerous” behavior by Iran, Time reports. Yet as recently as Friday, the Pentagon announced that they were sending additional troops and firepower with the aim of building up the American military presence in the area, including land, sea, and air forces. Meanwhile, the State Department, as The Inquisitr has detailed, issued an emergency declaration that would allow the administration to push forward an $8.1 billion weapons deal with Saudi Arabia and other regional allies in an end run around the usual congressional approval process necessary for such deals.
Congressional Democrats and other critics of the move have vocally opposed the deal, calling into question the degree to which Iran is a threat and questioning the president’s motives in the deal.
Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, said in a prepared statement that the Trump administration had failed “to even identify which legal mechanism it thinks it is using,” adding that the notification “described years of malign Iranian behavior but failed to identify what actually constitutes an emergency today.”
US to send 1,500 troops to Middle East amid rising tensions with Iran https://t.co/BHx8Vm1vsP pic.twitter.com/DXntYNWEro
— New York Post (@nypost) May 24, 2019
A confrontation between the United States and Iran has been all but inevitable since President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. from a multilateral nuclear deal reached under the Obama Administration, which largely curtailed Iran’s development of nuclear technology.
Military leadership, as well as the Trump administration, has pointed to a number of recent altercations in the Middle East, including an assault on four tankers in the Gulf of Oman and drone attacks against Saudi oil assets, as evidence of Iran’s increasing hostility towards the U.S. and allies.
Each incident was organized by “the leadership of Iran at the highest level,” said Admiral Michael Gilday, the U.S. military’s Joint Staff director.
“Even more troubling, we’ve had multiple credible reports that Iranian proxy groups intend to attack U.S. personnel in the Middle East,” he explained.
While there has been no shortage of such accusations in recent weeks, the American people have yet to see any of the evidence supporting the conclusion that Iran is behind the incidents, or that the country poses a growing threat of late.
According to Gilday, the intelligence behind this information is too sensitive to reveal at this time.
“I can’t reveal the sources of that reporting except to say, with very high confidence, we tie the Iranians to those,” he said.
