U.S. walking fine line on Saudi oil field hit
Crude production said to be half restored
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s administration sought to balance diplomacy with fresh talk of military action Tuesday in response to the fiery missile and drone attack on the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was headed to Jiddah in Saudi Arabia to discuss possible responses to what U.S. officials believe was an attack from Iranian soil. Trump said he’d “prefer not” to meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at next week’s United Nations session, but “I never rule anything out.”
But Iran’s supreme leader Tuesday did rule out a direct meeting with the United States.
“All the officials in the Islamic Republic unanimously believe that there will be no negotiations at any level with the United States,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said, according to remarks published on his website.
Iran continued to deny involvement in the weekend attack on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq oil processing plant and its Khurais oil field, a strike that interrupted the equivalent of
about 5% of the world’s daily oil supply.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration was moving cautiously as it sought to keep up a pressure campaign aimed at forcing Tehran to negotiate on broader issues with the U.S. while deterring any further Iranian attacks. It all was occurring as the administration deals with a host of other foreign policy issues and has no national security adviser, after the recent ouster of John Bolton.
Echoing Trump’s warning from earlier in the week, Vice President Mike Pence said American forces were “locked and loaded” for war if needed. But he also noted that Trump said he doesn’t want war with Iran or anyone else.
“As the president said yesterday, it’s ‘certainly looking like’ Iran was behind these attacks,” Pence said. “And our intelligence community at this very hour is working diligently to review the evidence.”
“You know, I’m not looking to get into new conflict,” Trump said Monday, “but sometimes you have to.”
Aides say he’s taking a prudent pause.
“The president’s being cautious, and if he were banging the gong today about Iran being the culprit, inevitably, without presenting the case to the American people, everyone would be saying he’s a warmonger,” said White House spokesman Hogan Gidley.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s energy minister said Tuesday that more than half of the country’s daily crude oil production that was knocked out by the attack had been recovered and production capacity at the targeted plants would be fully restored by the end of the month.
“During the two past days, we managed to contain the damage by recovering more than half of the production that we had lost during that terrorist attack,” Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said at a briefing in Jiddah. “Thus the company will be able to meet all its commitments to customers this month by drawing on its crude oil reserves.”
Abqaiq has restarted and is now processing about 2 million barrels a day, said Aramco Chief Executive Officer Amin Nasser. The facility should return to pre-attack levels of about 4.9 million barrels a day by the end of September, he said.
The long-awaited statement from the kingdom gave the market much-needed clarity after days of speculation over how severe the damage was at the Abqaiq plant.
However, it is slower progress than was initially expected, and crude prices remain elevated as traders factor in higher risks for Saudi supply.
The oil market has been gripped with uncertainty since the attack. Brent crude fell 5.7% to $59.31 a barrel in London. The international benchmark jumped the most on record Monday.
GATHERING EVIDENCE
Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday that U.S. military experts were in Saudi Arabia working with counterparts to “do the forensics on the attack” — gleaning evidence that could help build a case for where the weapons originated.
Analysts are poring over satellite imagery of the damage sites and assessing radar tracks of at least some of the low-flying cruise missiles that were used.
Communication intercepts from before and after the attacks are being reviewed to see if they implicate Iranian officials.
And forensic analysis is underway on missile and drone parts from the attack sites. The Saudis have recovered pristine circuit boards from one of the cruise missiles that fell short of its target, providing forensics specialists the possibility of tracing the missile’s point of origin, according to a senior U.S. official briefed on the intelligence.
Iran’s alleged involvement in a recent series of provocations in the Persian Gulf coincides with key moments in the unraveling of the country’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, from which Trump unilaterally withdrew the U.S. in May of last year. That was followed by a U.S. economic sanctions campaign, dubbed “maximum pressure,” that has cut off much of Iran’s international oil exports.
Iran, in turn, has said no one will be able to export oil from the region if Tehran can’t.
Speaking to reporters in London, Dunford noted — as Trump had on Monday — that the attack was not aimed at the United States or U.S. forces. Therefore, he said, no steps were being taken to beef up the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf region, which includes air defense forces and support troops at Prince Sultan Air Base south of the Saudi capital of Riyadh. The U.S. Navy has an aircraft carrier battle group in the area, and fighter and bomber aircraft elsewhere in the Persian Gulf.
A senior administration official said the U.S. sees a role to play for the U.N. Security Council, which was created to address threats to international peace and security. The U.S. believes the attack meets that threshold, but the administration first needs to “gather the releasable” information and intelligence it has collected about the strike, according to the official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss the attacks and spoke only on condition of anonymity. The security council meets next week in New York.
Trump also faces a skeptical Congress. A bipartisan group of House members Monday called for new language in 2020 defense spending bills that would prevent the president from starting a war with Iran without congressional authorization.
Pence met privately on Capitol Hill with Senate Republicans, and lawmakers were reviewing classified intelligence about the attack. Some Republican senators said a three-page document shared with Congress is convincing that Iran was behind the attack.
Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, said he was “100% convinced” it was Iran.
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said the president is trying to build a regional coalition before any action.
“I think the appropriate response would be to knock one of the refineries in Iran out of business,” Graham told reporters. He has spoken to the president and expects more information at an “appropriate time.”
Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, a member of the Armed Services Committee, acknowledged that the intelligence is “pretty good” that there’s an Iran connection, but he warned the Trump administration off a military response.
“The administration is lying to the American people when they say it was an unprovoked attack,” Kaine said, arguing that the U.S. imposed sanctions and withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal are provoking Iran’s behavior.
“We should not go to war to protect Saudi oil, but we should not go to another war that’s premised upon lying to the American public,” Kaine said.
Information for this article was contributed by Robert Burns, Aya Batrawy, Jon Gambrell, Lolita C. Baldor, Lisa Mascaro, Zeke Miller, Sagar Meghani and Michael Biesecker of The Associated Press; by Eric Schmitt and David D. Kirkpatrick of The New York Times; by Kareem Fahim, Erin Cunningham, Shane Harris, Will Englund, Paul Sonne, Louisa Loveluck, Charles Maynes, Ali Al-Mujahed, Anne Gearan, Steven Mufson, Missy Ryan, Dan Lamothe, Karoun Demirjian and Carol Morello of The Washington Post; and by Anthony DiPaola of Bloomberg News.