Pentagon Announces US Will Deploy Troops To Saudi Arabia In Response To “Iran Attacks”

And now for the Friday evening tape bomb.

For the past five days, the world awaited to see what, if any, would be Trump’s response to last Saturday’s attack on Saudi oil facilities that has taken out millions of barrels of crude production out of the market for an indefinite period. Moments ago we got the first offical reaction, when US Defense Secretary Mark Esper said this in lieu of an immediate military strike on Iran, the Pentagon will deploy additional troops and military equipment to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to beef up security.

The Defense Secretary said that “the Iranian attack” – which we assume means it has been now settled that Iran was behind the attack despite the lack of actual evidence and just more verbal confirmations, a la the staged “Syrian chemical attacks” – on Saudi oil facilities was a dramatic escalation, and added that President Trump approved deployment of U.S. forces, clarifying that such a deployment will be defensive.

Actually, scratch that: as other U.S. and Saudi officials have done, Esper stopped short of confirming that the strikes originated from Iran, but he said investigators have concluded that the weapons used in the attack were produced by Iran and were not launched from Yemen, so might as well infer that Tehran is behind it all.

While Esper and Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said details of the “force package” deployment will be determined over the coming days, it will include air and missile defense and a “moderate” troop increase, although the number of troops “will not be in the thousands.”

WATCH LIVE: Defense Secretary Esper expected to make announcement on Saudi Arabia https://t.co/zR08oqza7u

— PBS NewsHour (@NewsHour) September 20, 2019

Esper said that while this is just the “first step”, he was not ruling out additional “kinetic” moves down the road, and said that it’s a response to requests from the Saudis and the UAE to help improve their air and missile defenses.

Now what? Well, with both Russia and China warning against any “rash” US escalation, we expect that both nations will deploy their own troops to Iran as the build up to the next global military conflict accelerates apace.