by Jack
“LONDON - The United States is playing a “very dangerous game” as it attempts to “drag Iran into an unnecessary war,” a senior Iranian official said Tuesday.
Hamid Baeidinejad, Iran’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, said the Trump administration made a “serious miscalculation” in deploying an aircraft carrier strike group, B-52 bombers and other military personnel and equipment to the Persian Gulf to counter alleged, unspecified Iranian threats.
Baeidinejad denied that Iran or its “proxies” were behind what Washington described as the “sabotage” of oil tankers in the Gulf belonging to Saudi Arabia,. . . ”
OPINION – The attack on the Saudi oil tankers, followed by the pipe line attack tend to validate that the “threats” the U.S. was responding to was the protection of Saudi Arabia from Iran. But despite the response, the attacks were carried out anyway. Bad for us – good for Iran.
The attacks were an attempt to pressure the Saudi’s to back off in Yemen. But, the bonus was it also caused some damage to the U.S., due to one of the oil tankers carrying crude to the USA. From the Iranian perspective, its always good to hurt the US whenever they can. They also caused economic damage to the UAE, a Saudi and U.S. ally. Mideast destabilization is a key element of Iran’s political goals because it keeps the pressure on the USA to come to bargaining table; the hope being a resolution leading to the lifting of sanctions against Iran.
The Iranian’s knew they could not risk A- symmetrical war against Saudi Arabia, but indirect (terrorist) attacks provided a certain amount of cover, visa vi, plausible deniability. In short, the Iranian threat was the setup for the three attacks. This allowed them to be the prime suspect, yet deny any involvement.
Long before the first Gulf war Iran was sponsoring terrorism in order to form a bridge of Shia’ influence all the way to the Congo and neighboring states. This is still a goal of an entrenched radical faction within the Iranian government. Yemen and many other terror attacks is just a consequence of that policy.