US blames Iran for oil attacks, downplays effects

The US administration today offered more circumstantial evidence to back its claim that Tehran is responsible for recent attacks on Middle East oil shipping, while downplaying the effect of those attacks on oil markets.

US intelligence agencies have confirmed that Iranian naval vessels approached the two tankers damaged on 13 June prior to the attacks and that senior Iranian commanders later reported that "personnel completed two actions," State Department Iran special envoy Brian Hook told a US House of Representatives panel today. Hook attributed the attacks to naval vessels operated by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Besides the movement of Iranian naval vessels, the US also points to undisclosed intelligence reports and an overall assessment that only Iran has the capability to carry out such attacks to justify its assertion that Tehran was responsible for attacks on six tankers and oil infrastructure over the last month and a half.

Hook plans to travel to the Middle East and Europe next week to share additional US intelligence on what Washington describes as active threats posed by Iran.

Leading Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee said today they can accept the premise that Tehran was responsible for the attacks. But they expressed concern that the administration is using the attacks as a pretext for bypassing Congress to engage in a military conflict with Iran.

"There are legitimate concerns about taking the administration at its word," said representative Ted Deutch (D-Florida), who heads the panel's Middle East subcommittee. Deutch pressed Hook to assure lawmakers that the administration does not plan to use military force against Iran on the pretext of tying Tehran to Islamist group al-Qaida. Every US administration since 2001 has adapted the congressional authorization of force against al-Qaida to carry out military operations in the Middle East beyond the original scope.

The military build-up announced by the administration seems "to be pushing us more toward confrontation than negotiation," Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Eliot Engel (D-New York) said.

"Everything we will do will be lawful," Hook said. "We are not looking for military action. We have kept our policy firmly in the guardrails of economic and diplomatic pressure."

Lawmakers also asked Hook to reconcile the administration's claim of success of its maximum pressure campaign against Tehran with the pattern of attacks on oil shipping that Washington attributes to Iran.

Hook in response suggested that the attacks could have been more damaging had the US not warned against them last month and increased its military presence in the Middle East. "A lot of what we have feared has not come to pass. We have put in place the right kind of policies against those attacks. What we have seen so far has not been at the scale we expected."

The administration's economic team is downplaying the effect of those attacks. "Iranian threats or even actions have had no impact on oil prices," White House chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow said yesterday.

The US will continue to vigorously enforce its ban on exports of Iranian crude and has warned foreign tanker and port operators of potential economic and criminal penalties, Hook said. "Now that we have zeroed out imports of Iranian crude oil, any oil that is leaving Iran to another country is illicit, unless it is going to floating storage," he said. "We do not believe that any port or ship operators should take on the liability of working with Iranian tankers."

The US is also asking Egypt to prevent the transit of Iranian tankers through the Suez Canal despite Cairo's obligations under the Constantinople Convention, which guarantees passage of all ships through the canal. The convention only makes an exception when Egypt is in a state of war.