US military to present several options to Trump on Iran

The Pentagon will present a broad range of military
options to President Donald Trump on Friday as he considers how to respond to
what administration officials say was an unprecedented Iranian attack on Saudi
Arabia’s oil industry.
In a White House meeting, the president will be
presented with a list of potential airstrike targets inside Iran, among other
possible responses, and he also will be warned that military action against the
Islamic Republic could escalate into war, according to US officials familiar
with the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The national security meeting will likely be the
first opportunity for a decision on how the US should respond to the attack on
a key Middle East ally. Any decision may depend on what kind of evidence the US
and Saudi investigators are able to provide proving that the cruise missile and
drone strike was launched by Iran, as a number of officials, including
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have asserted.
Iran has denied involvement and warned the US that
any attack will spark an “all-out war” with immediate retaliation from Tehran.
Both Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence have
condemned the attack on Saudi oil facilities as “an act of war.” Pence said
Trump will “review the facts, and he’ll make a decision about next steps. But
the American people can be confident that the United States of America is going
to defend our interest in the region, and we’re going to stand with our
allies.”
The US response could involve military, political
and economic actions, and the military options could range from no action at
all to airstrikes or less visible moves such as cyberattacks. One likely move
would be for the US to provide additional military support to help Saudi Arabia
defend itself from attacks from the north, since most of its defenses have
focused on threats from Houthis in Yemen to the south.
Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, emphasized to a small number of journalists traveling with him Monday
that the question of whether the US responds is a “political judgment” and not
for the military.
“It is my job to provide military options to the
president should he decide to respond with military force,” Dunford said.
Trump will want “a full range of options,” he said.
“In the Middle East, of course, we have military forces there and we do a lot
of planning and we have a lot of options.”
US Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Michigan, said in an
interview Thursday that if Trump “chooses an option that involves a significant
military strike on Iran that, given the current climate between the US and
Iran, there is a possibility that it could escalate into a medium to
large-scale war, I believe the president should come to Congress.”
Slotkin, a former top Middle East policy adviser for
the Pentagon, said she hopes Trump considers a broad range of options,
including the most basic choice, which would be to place more forces and
defensive military equipment in and around Saudi Arabia to help increase
security.
A forensic team from US Central Command is pouring
over evidence from cruise missile and drone debris, but the Pentagon said the
assessment is not finished. Officials are trying to determine if they can get navigational
information from the debris that could provide hard evidence that the strikes
came from Iran.
Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said Thursday
that the US has a high level of confidence that officials will be able to
accurately determine exactly who launched the attacks last weekend.
US officials were unwilling to predict what kind of
response Trump will choose. In June, after Iran shot down an American
surveillance drone, Trump initially endorsed a retaliatory military strike then
abruptly called it off because he said it would have killed dozens of Iranians.
The decision underscores the president’s long-held reluctance to embroil the
country in another war in the Middle East.
Instead, Trump opted to have US military cyber
forces carry out a strike against military computer systems used by Iran’s
Revolutionary Guard to control rocket and missile launchers, according to US
officials.