https://www.snafu-solomon.com/2019/0...elligence.html

Israeli Minister of Intelligence declared that Israel is now in “an open confrontation with Iran”…

Looks like the USA is about to declare the IRGC a terrorist organisation, with all that entails - and Iran will retaliate.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKCN1RJ07U

Iran will retaliate in kind if U.S. designates Guards as terrorists: MPs

Reuters) - Iran will take reciprocal action against the United States if Washington designates the elite Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) as terrorists, a majority of Iranian parliamentarians said on Sunday, according to state news agency IRNA.

The United States is expected to designate the Revolutionary Guards a foreign terrorist organisation, three U.S. officials told Reuters, marking the first time Washington has formally labelled another country’s military a terrorist group.

"We will answer any action taken against this force with a reciprocal action," a statement issued by 255 out of the 290 Iranian lawmakers said, according to IRNA.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news...gc-terrorists/

Trump designates Iran's Guard as terrorists

President Trump on Monday designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, saying its sponsorship of terror in Iraq and elsewhere is unacceptable and that he needed to send an “unprecedented” message that it won’t be tolerated.

It is the first time the U.S. government has designed a segment of a foreign government as a foreign terrorist organization, or FTO. The designation is designed to warn individuals or companies off doing businesses with the corps, including its Quds Force, because doing so would be considered a criminal offense by the U.S.

This action sends a clear message to Tehran that its support for terrorism has serious consequences,” Mr. Trump said in a White House statement. “We will continue to increase financial pressure and raise the costs on the Iranian regime for its support of terrorist activity until it abandons its malign and outlaw behavior.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned that global banks and businesses “have a clear duty” to not work with the organisation....... Mr. Pompeo cited the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 American military members, and the organization’s support to Syria’s Assad regime in the designation. He also said that IRGC Gen. Qasem Soleimani was responsible for killing 603 U.S. troops during the Iraq war........

Administration officials said the Iranians “forced our hands” in designating the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization, citing actions in Iraq that have killed Americans and its work as the “central banker” and chief state sponsor of terror around the globe.

Congressional Republicans applauded Mr. Trump’s move, citing their longtime support for cracking down on the force.

“A formal designation and its consequences may be new, but these IRGC butchers have been terrorists for a long time,” Sen. Ben Sasse, Nebraska Republican, said. “This would be an important step in our maximum-pressure campaign against Iran, the largest state-sponsor of terror and the biggest chaos agent inside the Middle East. This would greatly expand our ability to roll back Iran’s ability to fund and export terror abroad.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, said he “completely” supports the decision and said the announcement is “another example of [the administration’s] commitment to reigning in the destructive and murderous Iranian regime.”

Didn’t look very far?

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/...004802358.html

http://intelnews.org/2019/05/09/01-2544/

The sudden decision by the United States to deploy significant firepower to the Middle East was partly in response to intelligence that was given to Washington by Israeli officials, according to a report. On Wednesday, the US announced that the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group had received instructions to sail to the Middle East. The aircraft carrier is reportedly sailing alongside a cruiser and four destroyers, while an unspecified number of B-52 heavy long-range bombers have been ordered to fly to a US military base in Qatar.

Commenting on this last-minute development, US National Security Adviser John Bolton warned Iran that it would face “unrelenting force” if it threatened American interests in the Middle East and beyond. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, said that the move aimed to “deter Iran […] so that there would be no ambiguity about our preparedness to respond to any threat against our people or partners in the region”. Speaking in Congress, the US Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan said that the decision to move a significant amount of firepower to the Middle East came in response to intelligence showing that Iran had “made plans to target US forces in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East”. According to ABC News, the intelligence suggested that “Iran or its proxies were planning attacks against US forces in Iraq, Syria and at sea”. But there was no further information reported about the precise nature of the alleged warnings.

Meanwhile, the American news and information website Axios said on Monday that the intelligence that caused Washington’s response was given to the US by Israeli officials. Citing “senior Israeli officials”, the website said that the intelligence given to the US had been gathered “primarily by the Mossad”, Israel’s main external intelligence agency. It added that the information about possible Iranian attacks against the US or its allies in the Middle East was “raised two weeks ago” during closed-door talks at the White House between a US team led by Bolton and an Israeli delegation headed by his Israeli counterpart, Meir Ben Shabbat. The intelligence, said Axios, showed that the US or its allies, including the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia, would be targeted by Iran. The information is “understood to be part of the reason for Bolton’s announcement” this week, said Axios.


​​​​​​​

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/s...ight-grnvn7gxl

Ships sabotaged as Iran warns it is ready to fight

Four merchant ships were targeted in a “sabotage operation” off the coast of the United Arab Emirates yesterday, the government said, as tensions rise between Iran and the United States. The foreign ministry of the UAE, a US ally, said that “four commercial, civilian trading vessels of various nationalities suffered acts of sabotage” off its eastern coast in the Gulf of Oman. It gave no indication of who might be responsible......

The UAE authorities had denied reports in Lebanese media, which is seen as sympathetic to Iran’s local proxy, Hezbollah, that there had been several explosions at the Fujairah port oil terminal. The reports were widely circulated by Iranian and Russian news sites and on social media.

Fujairah is in a key location near the Strait of Hormuz, a critical corridor for the global energy market that Iran has repeatedly threatened to block. Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, head of the Iranian parliament’s national security committee, said reports of “explosions” showed that the security of Gulf states was “like glass”........

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...rted-sabotaged

Saudi oil tankers show 'significant damage' after sabotage attack, says Riyadh

Two Saudi oil tankers have suffered “significant damage” in an apparent sabotage attack off the coast of Fujairah, part of the United Arab Emirates, the Saudi energy minister has said.......

One of the two vessels was on its way to be loaded with Saudi crude oil bound for customers in the US, state news agency SPA reported. The attack did not lead to any casualties or an oil spill but caused significant damage to the structures of the two vessels, said Saudi energy minister Khalid al-Falih on Monday.

On Sunday, the UAE foreign ministry said four commercial vessels were targeted by “sabotage operations” near its territorial waters but gave no details of the nature of the sabotage.......

Well, despite the vague nature of the Drive article above, we have all seen the jagged hole at the waterline in the stern of one of these ships. (See Andrea Victory, Bergen, in BBC article above) There was a similar attack a couple of years ago I remember where some craft managed to creep up undetected to a (Japanese?) tanker and hit it mysteriously.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...of-Hormuz.html

Al Jazeera article with some background perspective in a video interview.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/...055332524.html


https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....88961b607.jpeg

[SPhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/outlo...=.23ca0d79ad13

Trump’s Iran policy is rooted in lies. The kind that got us into the Iraq War.

Failing to see his dishonesty for what it is could have devastating consequences.

Ben RhodesPresident Trump speaks to the press on the White House South Lawn Tuesday. (Al Drago/Bloomberg)Ben

Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser during the Obama administration, is author of " ."
May 16 at 6:40 AMThe Iraq War showed us all what happens when exaggerations and lies are weaponized to justify an ideological push for war: In 2002 and 2003, a relentless series of ominous, overblown public statements and bogus intelligence reports were used to justify an invasion — part of a deliberate campaign to make an offensive military action look defensive: “Should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation,” President George W. Bush said, “the American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war.”

It wasn’t true. Yet Bush made the case that the United States had to attack before Hussein could use weapons of mass destruction that Iraq didn’t really have. Now a similar cycle of deception may be repeating itself with President Trump’s increasingly belligerent posture on Iran.

Trump’s Iran policy has long been rooted in falsehoods. In 2017, his administration refused to certify the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the Iran nuclear deal — on the premise that Iran wasn’t complying with the terms. That wasn’t true. Earlier that year, the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed Iran’s compliance; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reported to Congress that “Iran is adhering to its JCPOA obligations”; and the U.S. intelligence community presented no evidence justifying Trump’s decertification.

Trump’s subsequent decision to withdraw from the JCPOA was no surprise. For years, he had railed against it as the “worst deal ever negotiated” by tossing out a raft of easily debunked assertions: that Iran was given $150 billion under the terms of the deal, a https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/13/president-trumps-claim-that-democrats-gave-iran-billion/?utm_term=.f1f73d82772d The Washington Post’s Fact Checker rated with four Pinocchios; that Iran’s regime was verging on “https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/10/14/fact-checking-president-trumps-speech-on-the-iran-deal/?utm_term=.ebcb88dec2cd” before the deal, implying that somehow the deal lent the regime new life. After pulling out, Trump has continued to his own intelligence community’s assessment that Iran had been complying. Numbed to a president who lies so regularly that it’s become the background noise to our political culture, his reckless exit from a multilateral, U.N. Security Council-endorsed arms-control agreement that wasn’t being violated was treated as just another routine turn of events in Trump’s Washington.

[Trump is moving us closer to war with Iran]

Since then, Trump’s administration has made every effort to manufacture a crisis with Iran. To the dismay of our closest European allies, the administration has repeatedly https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/us/politics/iran-nuclear-deal.html new sanctions; officially https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/08/politics/iran-us-irgc-designation/index.html Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization; announced an “https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/08/us-iran/567751/” in the same week as the 65th anniversary of a U.S.-backed coup in Iran; , via a tweeted-out video message from national security adviser John Bolton, that the Iranian regime wouldn’t “ ”; and https://www.foxnews.com/politics/rand-paul-slams-pompeo-over-potential-war-against-iran-says-admin-doesnt-have-authority that the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force against al Qaeda and associated forces could be applied to war with Iran.

This month, the manufactured crisis was escalated. Bolton announced the deployment of a U.S. aircraft carrier strike group and a bomber task force to the region, unspecified “troubling and escalatory indications and warnings” from Iran that could lead to the use of “unrelenting force” by the United States. Days later, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-iran-trump-pompeo/pompeo-warns-iran-against-attacking-us-interests-idUSKCN1SF2L6 that any attacks from Iran or its proxies would be met with a “swift and decisive U.S. response.” The State Department has drawn down some of our personnel in nearby Baghdad, again citing unspecified threats from Iran.

Our allies have contradicted this view: Speaking at the Pentagon this week, a British major general stated, “There’s been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria.”

The ideological agenda behind the administration’s rhetoric and policies is clear. Bolton, in particular, has long advocated regime change and called for war, writing an op-ed in 2015 for the New York Times titled, “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” Israel and Saudi Arabia — with governments that have cultivated close ties with Trump — favor confrontation with Iran. Based on that history, it’s hard not to conclude that Trump’s administration has pursued a clear strategy: provoke Iran into doing something that gives a pretext for war. And as with Iraq, the administration has used exaggerations and unspecified intelligence reports to lay the predicate that an offensive war against Iran will be defensive. In that context, the closure of the U.S. consulate in Basra and the Baghdad embassy drawdown are ominous, removing targets that could feature in an Iranian response to a U.S. attack.

[Obama worried with foreign leaders about Trump. The president has proved them right.]

The remaining question involves President Trump’s ultimate intentions. He campaigned pledging to end U.S. wars in the Middle East and as recently as his State of the Union address earlier this year, said “Great nations do not fight endless wars.” But he also clearly revels in undoing the progress of President Barack Obama’s Iran deal and posing as a tough guy on the world stage. He could (and should) pivot back to diplomacy, as he’s attempted to do with North Korea, though his actions to date have only set back the starting point for serious diplomatic efforts. Instead, on his watch, our country has become isolated from our allies and, unsurprisingly, Iran has signaled that it plans to restart elements of its nuclear program that were rolled back or halted under the JCPOA. Trump could still pull back from the brink, or he could follow the momentum of his own creation into a war that could be a deadly, costly disaster.

We don’t know what he’ll do. But we know Trump is averse to truth, addicted to lies, and that what he says about Iran should be treated with tremendous skepticism. The consequences of a war with Iran — a much larger, more determined and more sophisticated adversary than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — should be urgently aired. And Congress, the branch of government empowered to declare war, should make clear that military action against Iran is not authorized.

It can be tempting, sometimes, to shrug off the false and misleading statements, more than 10,000 and counting, that Trump has habitually proffered while in office. But if we slide into another war based on a fundamentally dishonest premise, Trump’s lies could wind up producing painful and far-reaching consequences.

To counter the above, from the Grauniad - not known as an American mouthpiece.....

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-for-proxy-war

Iran’s most prominent military leader has recently met Iraqi militias in Baghdad and told them to “prepare for proxy war”, the Guardian has learned.

Two senior intelligence sources said that Qassem Suleimani, leader of Iran’s powerful Quds force, summoned the militias under Tehran’s influence three weeks ago, amid a heightened state of tension in the region. The move to mobilise Iran’s regional allies is understood to have triggered fears in the US that Washington’s interests in the Middle East are facing a pressing threat. The UK raised its threat levels for British troops in Iraq on Thursday.

While Suleimani has met regularly with leaders of Iraq’s myriad Shia groups over the past five years, the nature and tone of this gathering was different. “It wasn’t quite a call to arms, but it wasn’t far off,” one source said.

The meeting has led to a frenzy of diplomatic activity between US, British and Iraqi officials who are trying to banish the spectre of clashes between Tehran and Washington and who now fear that Iraq could become an arena for conflict. The gathering partly informed a US decision to evacuate non-essential diplomatic staff from the US embassy in Baghdad and Erbil and to raise the threat status at US bases in Iraq. It also coincided with a perceived separate risk to US interests and those of its allies in the Persian Gulf and led to a heightened threat that more than a decade of proxy conflicts may spill over into a direct clash between Washington and Tehran.

Leaders of all the militia groups that fall under the umbrella of Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Units (PMUs) were in attendance at the meeting called by Suleimani, the intelligence sources claimed. One senior figure who learned about the meeting had since met with western officials to express concerns. As the head of the elite Quds force, Suleimani plays a significant role in the militias’ strategic directions and major operations. Over the past 15 years, he has been Iran’s most influential powerbroker in Iraq and Syria, leading Tehran’s efforts to consolidate its presence in both countries and trying to reshape the region in its favour.......