With the US having signed off on another 1,500 ground troops being sent to the Middle East, some justification is needed. A top Pentagon official is relying on previous speculation to make this all look very official.



Vice Admiral Michael Gilday told reporters that the US has “very high confidence” that recent sabotage of oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates was done by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. He also claimed rockets recent fired ib Baghdad were fired by “Iranian proxies.“



All previous indications were that they didn’t have a very good idea who was behind the sabotage, and couldn’t rule out non-state actors, so they didn’t pursue the allegation. Blaming rockets on “Iranian proxies” is much simpler, since the US considers wide swathes of the Iraqi government security forces to be such proxy forces, and it wouldn’t be shocking if it was such a group.



Yet these are all, again, allegations that were too flimsy when they actually happened in the past few weeks for the US to publicly make a big deal out of them. It is only now, as escalation moves forward, that officials are falling back on them as the best they can do to justify continued buildup toward a war with Iran.



Author: Jason Ditz Jason Ditz is news editor of Antiwar.com. View all posts by Jason Ditz