Today is a rainy day

This tidbit from the Washington Post about the weekend attack on Saudi oil facilities is both telling and appalling:

U.S. officials are working under the assumption that the strikes did not emanate from Yemen and do not believe they were launched from Iraq, either…

While I am open to believing that the attacks came from Iran once evidence to that effect is published and thoroughly analyzed, there should be no assumptions in the investigation at this early stage, especially as Yemen’s Houthis have claimed responsibility. Nor should a US response be up to the Saudis, as President Trump suggested in a foolish “locked and loaded” tweet in which he said he was waiting to take military action for the Saudi assessment of responsibility.

Certainly the attack is consistent with what the Iranians have said they would do: respond to US sanctions by interfering with global energy supplies. Most of us, including me, believed this referred to stopping shipping through the strait of Hormuz, but that is just because we lack imagination. Taking down half of Saudi production capacity with a few missiles is much more clever: it doesn’t bring Iran directly into conflict with the US or block a passageway that Tehran uses as much as its Gulf neighbors. It is entirely possible that Iran, perhaps acting through the Houthis, was responsible.

But there is a long history of American wars starting or escalating with blame that was mis-assigned, too often intentionally:

• the explosion of the Maine that precipitated the Spanish-American war,
• the Gulf of Tonkin attack on the US Navy and the escalation of the Vietnam war,
• the claim that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons that led the US into a decade of disastrous engagement in Iraq.

Especially with a president facing the threat of impeachment at home and with few friends abroad, we need to be exigent about assignment of responsibility.

We also need to ask what will happen after an attack on Iran. Will the US be better off, or will the Islamic Republic gain? Its road to nuclear weapons is now short, less than a year, due to Trump’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Do we really want to risk pushing Tehran to a crash nuclear weapons program with a calibrated attack? What kind of military intervention would be required to prevent that course of action?

Regardless of who initiated the attack on Saudi Arabia, Washington should also be asking how it was allowed to happen. Is it possible that the hundreds of billions of dollars in military equipment the US has sold to Saudi Arabia is incapable of preventing such an attack? Or were the Saudis asleep at the switch? Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is, among many other things, Minister of Defense. We know however how reluctant Trump is to assign responsibility for any failures to him.

Fortunately, the US has time to respond: if oil prices spike, I trust we’ll draw down on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which will limit the spike and provide time to evaluate and repair the damage in Saudi Arabia. Those who have advocated selling oil from the SPR at low prices should note: best to save it for a rainy day. That’s today.