mohammed-bin-salman

Iran Accuses U.S. of Framing it for Tanker Sabotage to Provoke Conflict

Iran accused officials in the Trump administration and its Middle East allies of attempting to frame it for an attack on oil tankers near a strategic Persian Gulf waterway.

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif on Tuesday said “some radical individuals inside the U.S. administration and the region” were pursuing “dangerous policies” in an attempt to pull the Americans into a military conflict with Iran.

“We had predicted that some would want to escalate tension in the region by some actions,” Mr. Zarif said in New Delhi after a meeting with his Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj.

.. “Spreading “fake intelligence” should alert everybody to what we call the B-team’s mal-intentions toward the region and the stability of the Persian Gulf,” Mr. Miryousefi said.

Iranian officials often use the term “B-team” for a quartet of people they say are trying to stoke conflict with Iran: White House Security Adviser

John Bolton, Israeli Prime Minister

Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi Crown Prince

Mohammed bin Salman and Emirati Crown Prince

Mohammed bin Zayed.

The White House has yet to directly blame Iran for the attack, but President Trump said Monday that, “If [the Iranians] do anything, they will suffer greatly.”

.. While Tehran has lashed out against the Trump administration for ditching the accord, it also spent weeks trying to de-escalate tensions by staying in the deal along with the other parties.

Even some U.S. officials acknowledge a reluctance from Iran to ratchet up tensions. In late April, one week after Washington said it would not renew waivers to Iran’s oil customers. A U.S. official said its military intelligence showed that the Iranian Navy had not changed its behavior in the Persian Gulf despite threats to close down the strait if Tehran itself was unable to use it.

Meanwhile, Iranian officials such as Mr. Zarif have warned that some officials in the U.S., alongside Saudi Arabia and Israel, might try to lure Iran into a military confrontation.

“There are worries about suspicious actions and sabotages in the region, and we have predicted them before,” Mr. Zarif said. He has previously said he doesn’t believe President Trump wants a war with Iran.

.. Saudi Arabia halted pumping on a major oil pipeline after two pipeline boosters were attacked by drones, the kingdom’s energy minister Khalid al-Falih said in a statement.

.. Saudi and U.S. officials accuse Iran of providing the Houthis with training and designs to build their drones. Tehran denies the charges.

.. The U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, appeared to temper tensions after the attacks on the tankers.

“We need to do a thorough investigation to understand what happened, why it happened, and then come up with reasonable responses short of war,” Ambassador John Abizaid told reporters in the Saudi capital Riyadh on Monday.

“It’s not in (Iran’s) interest, it’s not in our interest, it’s not in Saudi Arabia’s interest to have a conflict,” he said.

Saudi Arabia: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Following the alarming disappearance of a Saudi journalist and political dissident, John Oliver examines America’s uncomfortably comfortable relationship with Saudi Arabia.

Jared Kushner’s Secret Meeting

Jared Kushner attends a secret meeting in Saudia Arabia with MBS that could benefit him and the Trumps. This is how Trump deals with the man responsible for killing and dismembering Jamal Koshoggi.

The Republicans have said to ban all Muslims because they are a national security risk, but are fine with giving Saudi Arabia nuclear reactors.

Jared and the Saudi Crown Prince Go Nuclear?

There are too many unanswered questions about the White House’s role in advancing Saudi ambitions.

Jared Kushner slipped quietly into Saudi Arabia this week for a meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, so the question I’m trying to get the White House to answer is this: Did they discuss American help for a Saudi nuclear program?

Of all the harebrained and unscrupulous dealings of the Trump administration in the last two years, one of the most shocking is a Trump plan to sell nuclear reactors to Saudi Arabia that could be used to make nuclear weapons.

Even as President Trump is trying to denuclearize North Korea and Iran, he may be helping to nuclearize Saudi Arabia. This is abominable policy tainted by a gargantuan conflict of interest involving Kushner.

Kushner’s family real estate business had been teetering because of a disastrously overpriced acquisition he made of a particular Manhattan property called 666 Fifth Avenue, but last August a company called Brookfield Asset Management rescued the Kushners by taking a 99-year lease of the troubled property — and paying the whole sum of about $1.1 billion up front.

Alarm bells should go off: Brookfield also owns Westinghouse Electric, the nuclear services business trying to sell reactors to Saudi Arabia.

Saudi swamp, meet American swamp.

It may be conflicts like these, along with even murkier ones, that led American intelligence officials to refuse a top-secret security clearance for Kushner. The Times reported Thursday that Trump overruled them to grant Kushner the clearance.

This nuclear reactor mess began around the time of Trump’s election, when a group of retired U.S. national security officials put together a plan to enrich themselves by selling nuclear power plants to Saudi Arabia. The officials included Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser, and they initially developed a “plan for 40 nuclear power plants” in Saudi Arabia, according to a report from the House Oversight and Reform Committee. The plan is now to start with just a couple of plants.

As recently as Feb. 12, Trump met in the White House with backers of the project and was supportive, Reuters reported.

These are civilian nuclear power plants, and Saudi Arabia claims it wants them for electricity. But the Saudis insist on producing their own nuclear fuel, rather than buying it more cheaply abroad. Producing fuel is a standard way for rogue countries to divert fuel for secret nuclear weapons programs, and the Saudi resistance to safeguards against proliferation bolsters suspicions that the real goal is warheads.

Trump may be vigilant (destructively so) about Iran’s nuclear plants, but in the Saudi case his response seems to be: There’s money to be made! When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raised objections to the transfer last year, Axios reported, “Trump and his advisers told Netanyahu that, if the U.S. does not sell the Saudis nuclear reactors, other countries like Russia or France will.”

Trump seems to believe that the Saudis have us over a barrel: If we don’t help them with nuclear technology, someone else will. That misunderstands the U.S.-Saudi relationship. The Saudis depend on us for their security, and the blunt truth is that we hold all the cards in this relationship, not them.

Why on earth would America put Prince Mohammed on a path to acquiring nuclear weapons? He is already arguably the most destabilizing leader in an unstable region, for he has

invaded Yemen,

kidnapped Lebanon’s prime minister,

started a feud with Qatar, and, according to American intelligence officials,

ordered the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.The prince has also

imprisoned and brutally tortured women’s rights activists, including one who I’m hoping will win the Nobel Peace Prize, Loujain al-Hathloul.

As Representative Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, has noted, “A country that can’t be trusted with a bone saw shouldn’t be trusted with nuclear weapons.”

The White House won’t clarify whether Kushner discussed the nuclear issue when he met Prince Muhammed a few days ago, but Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, told me, “I’d be surprised if it didn’t come up.” Along with Senators Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, Merkley has introduced a resolution to oppose the transfer of nuclear technology that would allow Saudi Arabia to create nuclear weapons.

There’s another element of Trump’s Saudi policy that is simply repulsive: the fawning courtship of a foreign prince who has created in Yemen the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, murdered a journalist and tortured women’s rights activists. The White House genuflections are such that Prince Mohammed had a point when, according to The Intercept, he bragged that he had Kushner in his “pocket.”

No one knows whether Prince Muhammed will manage to succeed his father and become the next king, for there is opposition and the Saudi economic transformation he boasts of is running into difficulties.

Trump and Kushner seem to be irresponsibly trying to boost the prince’s prospects, increasing the risk that an unstable hothead will mismanage the kingdom for the next 50 years. Perhaps with nuclear weapons.