Juan Cole: Trump Awaits orders from Saudis; and Why the Houthis could have Done It
Ann Arbor (Informed
Comment) – Trump’s bizarre infatuation with strongmen and dictators was on full
display in his response to Saturday’s drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil
facilities. As our foremost Gulf expert, Kristian Ulrichsen, noted, Trump actually said
that he was waiting on the Saudis to determine the guilty party and to tell him
what to do!
We all kept saying it
is dangerous to have an erratic person like Trump in the White House in case
there was a major global crisis. This might be it, folks. The responsibility for
the ten drone strikes on the Abqaiq and Khurais facilities is in dispute, with
the Israelis and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo fingering Shiite militias in
Iraq, whereas the Houthi rebels of north Yemen claimed they sent the drones. One
anonymous Trump official even told ABC on Sunday that Iran directly
launched drones and cruise missiles on Saudi Arabia.
We await forensics, but
this allegation should be provable from forensics. It hasn’t been, and sounds
Gulf of Tonkinish to me. If it is true, buy an electric car quick. One of the arguments for
the Iraqi provenance of the drones is that the Houthis were not known to have
this capability before now. This allegation is not true. As I
discussed in May, the Houthis used drones to hit Aramco pumping
stations in al-Duwadimi (853 miles from Sana’a) and Afif (764 miles from
Sana’a). The Houthis only had to go another hundred miles or so to reach Abqaiq
from their stronghold at Saada (about 1,000 miles).
In May, the Houthis
must have used Iran’s Shahed 129 UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) or something
very like it, which has a range of 1100 miles and has been used for similar
strikes by Iranian forces in Syria. The advantage of drones for smuggling
weapons to the Houthis by Iran is that they could simply be flown to them from
a vessel offshore in the Red Sea.
If the drone can go
1,100 miles, there is no advantage to taking off from Iraq rather than Yemen.
In murder mysteries we
look at means, motive and opportunity. The Houthis have the most motive of any
of these actors, since the Saudis have dropped thousands of bombs on them for
nearly four and a half years. Moreover, the Houthis have nothing to lose. They
are already being hit as hard by the Saudis as they can be hit, and they have
no resources that the Saudis can destroy….
https://www.juancole.com/2019/09/awaits-orders-houthis.html