{"id":39378,"date":"2019-05-15T19:23:58","date_gmt":"2019-05-15T19:23:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=39378"},"modified":"2019-05-15T19:23:58","modified_gmt":"2019-05-15T19:23:58","slug":"lebanons-cabinet-postpones-final-budget-meeting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=39378","title":{"rendered":"Lebanon\u2019s cabinet postpones final budget meeting"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nWASHINGTON:\u00a0International worries that the Trump administration is sliding toward war with Iran flared into the open amid skepticism about its claims that the Islamic republic poses a growing threat to the US and its allies in the Arabian Gulf and beyond.<\/p>\n

\nThe US military on Tuesday rebutted doubts expressed by a British general about such a threat. President Donald Trump denied a report that the administration has updated plans to send up to 120,000 troops to counter Iran if necessary. But Trump then stirred the controversy further by saying: \u201cWould I do that? Absolutely.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nUnderscoring what the US says is heightened risk to US personnel, the US Embassy in Baghdad on Wednesday ordered all non-essential, non-emergency government staff to leave Iraq immediately.<\/p>\n

\nStill, the general\u2019s remarks exposed international skepticism over the American military buildup in the Middle East, a legacy of the 2003 invasion of Iraq that was predicated on false intelligence. US officials have not publicly provided any evidence to back up claims of an increased Iranian threat amid other signs of allied unease.<\/p>\n

\nAs tensions in the region started to surge, British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said his nation was worried about the risk of accidental conflict \u201cwith an escalation that is unintended really on either side.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nOn Tuesday, Spain temporarily pulled one of its frigates from the US-led combat fleet heading toward the Strait of Hormuz. That was followed by the unusual public challenge to the Trump administration by the general.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cNo, there\u2019s been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria,\u201d said Maj. Gen. Chris Ghika, a senior officer in the US-backed coalition fighting Daesh.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nGhika, speaking in a video conference from coalition headquarters in Baghdad, told reporters at the Pentagon that the coalition monitors the presence of Iranian-backed forces \u201calong with a whole range of others because that\u2019s the environment we\u2019re in.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nBut he added: \u201cThere are a substantial number of militia groups in Iraq and Syria, and we don\u2019t see any increased threat from any of them at this stage.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nLate in the day, in a rare public rebuttal of an allied military officer, US Central Command said Ghika\u2019s remarks \u201crun counter to the identified credible threats\u201d from Iranian-backed forces in the Mideast.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nIn a statement, Central Command said the coalition in Baghdad has increased the alert level for all service members in Iraq and Syria.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cAs a result, (the coalition) is now at a high level of alert as we continue to closely monitor credible and possibly imminent threats to US forces in Iraq,\u201d the statement said.<\/p>\n

\nTrump, who has repeatedly argued for avoiding long-term conflicts in the Mideast, discounted a New York Times report that the US has updated plans that could send up to 120,000 troops to counter Iran if it attacked American forces.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cWould I do that? Absolutely,\u201d he told reporters Tuesday at the White House. \u201cBut we have not planned for that. Hopefully we\u2019re not going to have to plan for that. If we did that, we\u2019d send a hell of a lot more troops than that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nReinforcing Trump\u2019s denial, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at a joint news conference in Sochi with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov: \u201cWe fundamentally do not seek war with Iran.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nA Trump administration official said a recent small meeting of national security officials was not focused on a military response to Iran, but instead concentrated on a range of other policy options, including diplomacy and economic sanctions. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.<\/p>\n

\nLavrov said Pompeo told him that a potential deployment of 120,000 US troops to the Mideast was only a \u201crumor.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nLavrov said the international community needs to focus on diplomacy with Iran, including on the potentially explosive issue of Iran\u2019s nuclear program, which is constrained by a US-brokered deal in 2015 that Trump has abandoned.<\/p>\n

\nUS Iran envoy Brian Hook told reporters traveling with Pompeo in Brussels that the secretary of state shared intelligence on Iran with allies since \u201cEurope shares our concerns about stability in the Gulf and the Middle East.\u201d What the Europeans do not share, however, is Washington\u2019s more aggressive approach to Iran.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cWe are very worried about the risk of a conflict happening by accident, with an escalation that is unintended really on either side but ends with some kind of conflict,\u201d British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt told reporters in Brussels.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cWhat we need is a period of calm to make sure that everyone understands what the other side is thinking,\u201d Hunt said.<\/p>\n

\nLast week, US officials said they had detected signs of Iranian preparations for potential attacks on US forces and interests in the Mideast, but Washington has not spelled out that threat.<\/p>\n

\nThe US has about 5,000 troops in Iraq and about 2,000 in Syria as part of the coalition campaign to defeat the Daesh group there. It also has long had a variety of air and naval forces stationed in Bahrain, Qatar and elsewhere in the Gulf, partly to support military operations against IS and partly as a counter to Iranian influence.<\/p>\n

\nGen. Ghika\u2019s comments came amid dramatically heightened tensions in the Middle East. The US in recent days has ordered the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group to the Gulf region, plus four B-52 bombers. It also is moving a Patriot air-defense missile battery to an undisclosed country in the area. As of Tuesday, the Lincoln and its strike group had passed through the Bab El-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea, but officials would not disclose their exact location.<\/p>\n

\nTensions rose another notch with reports o Sunday that four commercial vessels anchored off the UAE had been damaged by sabotage.<\/p>\n

\nA US military team was sent to the UAE to investigate, and one US official said the initial assessment is that each ship has a 5- to 10-foot hole in it, near or just below the water line. The official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation, said the early interpretation is that the holes were caused by explosive charges.<\/p>\n

\nAn initial assessment is that the damage was done by Iranian or Iranian-backed proxies, but they are still going through the evidence and have not yet reached a final conclusion, the official said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON:\u00a0International worries that the Trump administration is sliding toward war with Iran flared into the open amid skepticism about its claims that the Islamic republic poses a growing threat to the US and its allies in the Arabian Gulf and beyond. The US military on Tuesday rebutted doubts expressed by a British general about such…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":39379,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/39379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}