Senior officials: US is successfully deterring Iran

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Senior officials: US is successfully deterring Iran

WASHINGTON DC (Kurdistan 24) - Trump administration officials affirmed on Tuesday that assertive US measures, including the dispatch of forces to the region, had succeeded in deterring Iran from carrying out attacks on US targets.

After briefing members of both the Senate and House of Representatives, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan told the press, “We have deterred attacks based on our re-posturing of assets, deterred attacks against American forces.”

Shanahan explained that he had informed the Congressmen about “credible intelligence” the administration had received “about threats to our interests in the Middle East and to American forces,” which had precipitated the military moves.

Read More: As US forces arrive in Middle East, Pentagon announces more deployments

He provided no details, although The Washington Post reported that the briefing Shanahan, along with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, presented to Congress included photographs of Iranians loading missiles onto small boats.

Shanahan appeared to suggest that no Iranian missiles had been fired, because of the muscular US moves. “This is about deterrence, not about war—or not about going to war,” he affirmed.

Pompeo told the press much the same. “Our ultimate objective over the past days,” he stated, “has been to deter Iran.”

The Congressional response seemed to divide along partisan lines, with Democrats suggesting “The intel has been misinterpreted and misrepresented,” by people who “want us to go to war in Iran, as a repeat to Iraq,” as one Democratic Congressman charged.

Another Democrat, Rep. Elissa Slotkin (Michigan), who is also a former CIA analyst, complained that Iranian proxies had regularly lobbed missiles into the Green Zone, and it was wrong for the Trump administration to make a big deal about such actions now.

“I spent some years in Baghdad during much more volatile times, when 40 or 50 rockets a day we’re coming into the green zone," Slotkin told USA Today.

But that is precisely the point that senior US officials are now making, Paul Davis, a former Pentagon analyst and now a Senior Fellow at Soran University, told Kurdistan 24.

“We’ve put up with Iranian aggression for far too long,” Davis said, as he noted that the administration is highlighting the fact that during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Iran was responsible for the deaths of 603 US soldiers.

Neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama did much to hold Tehran to account.

Unlike Democrats, Republicans were generally supportive. “The action taken by the administration is totally appropriate," Sen. Mitt Romney (R, Utah) said. "Our intelligence community had a high degree of confidence that something might occur that would be of detriment to our personnel.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R, South Carolina), a close Trump ally, tweeted his support, “The Obama-era policy of Iranian appeasement is over.”

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