Whose Idea Was It to Send 1000 Troops to the Middle East?

Reuters
Reuters

Task and Purpose

Politics, Middle East

Confusion at the Pentagon.

Whose Idea Was It to Send 1000 Troops to the Middle East?

The latest deployment comes little more than three weeks after the Defense Department dispatched about 900 additional troops to the U.S. Central Command region and extended about 600 service members already there.

The Pentagon is sending nearly 1,000 more troops to the Middle East as part of an escalating crisis with Iran that defense officials are struggling to explain.

While the U.S. government has publicly blamed Iran for recent attacks on merchant vessels in the Gulf of Oman, not a single U.S. official has provided a shred of proof linking Iran to the explosive devices found on the merchant ships.

At an off-camera briefing on Monday, Navy officials acknowledged that nothing in imagery released by the Pentagon shows Iranian Revolutionary Guards planting limpet mines on ships in the Gulf of Oman.

U.S. Central Command has identified a boat from which men detached one of those mines as belonging to Iran, but they were unable to say how that was determined. The boat has no distinctive markings and is flying no flag in pictures released by the Pentagon.

Yet Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan announced late on Monday that he is sending roughly 1,000 more troops to the Middle East “for defensive purposes to address air, naval, and ground-based threats.”

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source: yahoo.com