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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A senior Pentagon official said on Wednesday there were indications that Iran could potentially carry out aggressive actions in the future, amid simmering tensions between Tehran and Washington.

Tensions in the Gulf have risen since attacks on oil tankers during the summer, including off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, and a major assault on energy facilities in Saudi Arabia. The United States has blamed Iran, which has denied being behind the attacks on global energy infrastructure.

We also continue to see indications, and for obvious reasons I wont go into the details, that potential Iranian aggression could occur, John Rood, the Pentagons No. 3 official, told reporters.

Rood did not provide details about what information he was basing that on or any timeline.

Weve sent very clear and blunt signals to the Iranian government about the potential consequences of aggression, Rood said.

Two U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said there was intelligence over the past month indicating that Iran was moving forces and weapons in the region.

It was not clear what specifically Iran was looking to do with the movements, they added.

One of the officials said that part of the concern was Iranian activity inside Iraq, which is experiencing anti-government protests.

Last year, Reuters reported that Iran had given ballistic missiles to Shiite proxies in Iraq and was developing the capacity to build more there to deter attacks on its interests in the Middle East and to give it the means to hit regional foes.

The United States has deployed thousands of additional military forces in the Middle East, including bombers and air defense personnel, to act as a deterrent against what Washington says is provocative Iranian behavior.

The U.S. officials said there were ongoing discussions about adding more U.S. troops in the region but that no decision had been made and the situation was fluid. They said the military regularly talked about forces around the world, including in the Middle East.

Iran has been facing weeks of sometimes violent protests against gasoline price hikes.

The unrest, which began on Nov. 15 after the government abruptly raised fuel prices by as much as 300 percent, spread to more than 100 cities and towns and turned political as young and working-class protesters demanded clerical leaders step down.

Tehrans clerical rulers have blamed thugs linked to its opponents in exile and the countrys main foreign foes - the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia - for the unrest.

Reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Peter Cooney

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Pentagon official says there are indications Iranian 'aggression' could occur - Reuters

Video by Alexander Stockton and Adam Westbrook

Parts of Iran are back online, and videos suppressed by the nations internet shutdown are starting to trickle onto social media. In the Video Op-Ed above, Raha Bahreini sheds light on the eye-opening stories that Irans government did not want you to see.

While internet service has been partly restored, many Iranians still do not have internet access on mobile phones, and government officials there have warned that connectivity may be blocked indefinitely. In a call for evidence of government repression during the blackout, the United States State Department says it has received almost 20,000 messages, videos and photographs.

A hike in fuel prices sparked protests across Iran. Ms. Bahreini exposes and analyzes footage of human rights abuses by Iranian security forces, including shootings into crowds of unarmed protesters. And she warns of what may come next incarceration, torture and forced confessions that will further oppress the Iranian people. If the world does not take a stand, Ms. Bahreini fears, Irans internet blackout may foreshadow the nations darkest days.

Raha Bahreini (@RahaBahreini) is a human rights lawyer and a researcher on Iran for Amnesty International.

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Opinion | What Iran Did Not Want You to See - The New York Times

The Iranian Armys deputy commander for operations Mahmoud Moussavi made the chilling threat adding proper measures will take place, according to the semi-official Iranian Mehr news agency. He added that the Islamic Republic will never adopt the heinous and illegal measures that some countries take in the seas, however, this does not mean that we will let them do whatever they want. He also said that once the elements involved in the attack have been identified, then proper measures, based on the expediency of the Islamic Republic, will be taken at the right time and place.

Iran is said to be currently dealing with documents that are reported to list the parties involved in the attack that took place in October.

The Sabiti tanker is owned by the National Iranian Oil Company and was hit by two missiles in the Red Sea.

Iran released images showing the shocking aftermath of an attack when it happened, while also warning it would hit back against the perpetrators.

The images showed two gaping holes in the hull of an oil tanker flying the flag of the Islamic Republic.

The alleged attack happened off the Saudi Arabian port of Jeddah.

Iran said that the cowardly attack on its own tanker was caused by a missile strike and vowed not to let it go unanswered.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Tehran had evidence the tanker damaged in the Red Sea was attacked with rockets fired from boats, warning that those responsible would face consequences.

During a news conference, which was broadcast on Iranian state television, Rouhani said that footage of the alleged attack existed, even though it has not yet been released.

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Tehran said the ship was hit by two separate explosions and likely by missiles, according to its owner.

The National Iranian Tanker Company released pictures of the vessel that showed holes, one square, both with sharp edges and oil pouring out into the sea.

The attack caused oil to spill from the tanker into the Red Sea, the NITC said, before it was eventually controlled and the vessel began slowly moving back towards Gulf waters.

The attack followed a series of unexplained strikes in May and June on shipping in and around the Gulf, a vital waterway linking oil-producing countries to world markets, as well as drone attacks on Saudi oil installations.

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Iran chillingly warns Tehran will respond to tanker attack at right time, place - Express.co.uk

The events of the last few weeks in Iran indicate that the country may be in for a repetition of the events of 1978 that led to the toppling of the Shah. Anti-government protests in Iran have reached a boiling point with the streets of several of Irans cities and towns reverberating with slogans demanding the overthrow of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. One can hear echoes of the Death to the Shah slogans of 197879 in these frenzied chants. Security forces have repeatedly opened fire, killing people by the dozenspossibly by the hundredsin order to disperse protestors just as they did in the autumn of 1978.

Irans economy is in a tailspin, which is what triggered the protests. It is in far worse shape today than was the case on the eve of the Shahs fall when there was a severe economic downturn because of economic mismanagement and misdirection despite the oil boom of the 1970s. The economic distress of the late 1970s was intimately related to the crony capitalism of the Shahs regime that hurt the traditional merchant class, symbolized by the bazar, as well as the newly developing middle class. It was no coincidence that the religiously observant bazaris bankrolled the movement led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini that overthrew the Shah.

The resemblances of the situation today with the last years of the Shahs rule are uncanny. The economic distress is in part the result of the economic sanctions, especially on the sale of Iranian oil, imposed by the United States since May 2018. Oil is the lifeline of the Iranian economy and accounts for a quarter of the countrys GDP and contributes about three-quarters of Irans public revenue. With oil exports slashed from 2.45 mbd to 0.26 mbd in the past year, the Iranian economy has gone into a severe recession. World Bank projections for 2019 indicate a negative growth rate of minus 8.7 percent in its GDP. The Iranian currency has fallen precipitately since the reimposition of sanctions with the unofficial rate plummeting to 135,000 to one U.S. dollar, thus adding to the financial woes of the Iranian public.

According to the World Bank, Higher import prices from the devaluation are expected to push inflation back above 30 percent in the coming years as inflationary expectations spiral and consumer sentiment falls leading to once again a period of stagflation for Iran. Despite the depreciation and drop in imports, the reduction in oil exports is estimated to almost eliminate the current account surplus which is lower than the earlier sanctions episode as oil prices are almost half of the levels they were in 2012/132013/14. The economys downward trajectory is also likely to put further pressure on the labor market and reverse recent job creation gains.

Crony capitalism with religious foundations controlled by the regime, and especially by the IRGC, controlling a large part of the economy and monopolizing certain crucial sectors has added to the peoples economic woes especially since their combined budgets of these foundations account for over 30 percent of central government spending that benefits a small segment of the elite. Additionally, according to World Bank estimates, the unemployment rate was over 12 percent as of April-June 2018 with youth unemployment over 28 percent in June 2018. One can reasonably expect this to have climbed higher with the reimposition of economic sanctions in May 2018 that has had a tremendous negative impact on the Iranian economy.

One of the byproducts of the Iranian economic downturn was the decision in November to increase the price of gasoline on an average by 50 percent. The Iranian public had become accustomed to a heavily subsidized price of oil and its sudden increase by such a hefty margin acted as the trigger for the protests that broke out almost immediately following the announcement of this decision. However, these economic woes build upon the frustration generated by political repression.

The current protests, as distinct from those of 2009 following the regime-engineered re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have been spontaneous and largely leaderless. No faction of the regime has been involved in the current demonstrations and thus they cut across the hardline-moderate divide. They also cut across class and ethnic divides with people of all classes joining in the protests and different ethnic groupsthe majority Persians as well as the minority Arab population of Khuzistanparticipating as well. Initially largely motivated by economic factors they have now taken on major political overtones demanding the removal not only of Rouhani and his government but of the supreme leader and the coterie of clerics around him as well.

The response of the regimes security forces has been swift and brutal with hundreds of unarmed protestors shot down in cold blood reminding observers of the events of 1978 in the lead up to the fall of the Shah. It seems that this brutality has had the effect of galvanizing the opposition to the regime just as it did in 1978, thus perpetuating the cycle of violence and resistance that reminds one eerily of the months preceding the Shahs fall.

The major unanswered question now is: Will the current protests have the same result as those of 1978 or will the regime be able to suppress them with the use of brutal force? It is difficult to answer this question with any degree of certainty especially because of a near-total news blackout imposed by the regime. The forces at the regimes command are not only well trained in suppressing dissent, but they are also ideologically committed to the system of clerically-dominated rule. Moreover, their commanders realize that the fall of the mullah-dominated regime could mean not only an end to their power and perks but to their physical existence as well. This is the lesson they have absorbed from the fall of the Shah, which led to the systematic decimation of the officer corps that had been loyal to him. They know they are fighting for their lives and not just for the perpetuation of clerical rule. This explains in large part the ferocity demonstrated by the regimes security apparatus in suppressing the demonstrations.

This means that the regime is likely to survive in the short term, but only in the short term. Its legitimacy has been irreparably damaged by the disproportionate and brutal use of force that it has unleashed on largely unarmed protestors. Hardly anyone in Iran now buys the argument that the governing powershardliners and moderates alikeare either defending Islam or the country against foreign enemies. Furthermore, unlike in earlier periods of turmoil, the regime does not have the surplus economic resources to buy off dissenters by offers of subsidies, a practice that the regime had engaged in time and again when oil prices remained high and the volume of oil exports was high as well. The drastic fall in the volume of oil exports has removed the financial buffer on which the government had depended earlier for its survival.

The regime may be able to survive this round of protests and demonstrations but both its legitimacy and its ability to hold on to power have been severely damaged, eroding almost beyond repair its capacity to manage future rounds of protests. There may not be a repetition of 1979 this year, but the protests have surely paved the way for its reprise in the not too distant future.

Mohammed Ayoob is University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of International Relations, Michigan State University, and a senior fellow for the Center for Global Policy. His books include The Many Faces of Political Islam and, most recently, Will the Middle East Implodeand editor of Assessing the War on Terror.

Image: Reuters

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Is Iran Near Collapse? - The National Interest Online

Anyone who thinks that the recent protests in 100 cities throughout Iran were about gas prices did not pay attention to what the protesters were saying. The immediate spark that led to the Arab Spring was the 2010 self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit vendor, but the Arab Spring revolution was not about Tunisian citizens ability to obtain permits to sell fruit. Likewise, this unrest in Iran was not about the price of gas. Iranian protesters (and rioters) chanting No to Gaza, no to Lebanon! Leave Syria and think of us, and even Death to Palestine! indicates that something much larger than the price of gas drove their outrage.

Forty years after the Islamic Revolution, substantial numbers of Iranians are finally rejecting the priorities of their masters.

When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini consolidated power in Iran for himself in 1979, he risked being accused of a sin that Islamists of all stripes object to in any non-Sharia government making partners with Allah, something specifically prohibited by the Koran (see 3:64, 12:40 and 42:41, for example).This accusation is especially relevant to democracies. As Abu al-Ali al-Mawdudi, founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami, one of the first Islamist organizations, put it: Democracy is the deification of man. Or, as current al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri put it: Democracies raise up gods, establish masters and assign partners to Allah Most High.

So Khomeini established the velayat-e-faqih (governance of the jurist), which allowed him to pretend that Iran was controlled by divine, rather than human, laws.The premise is that Khomeinis hand-picked jurors (the mullahs), under the watchful eye of the Rahbar (Supreme Leader) Khomeini, were simply guiding the country until the 12th imam comes out of hiding to usher in the end of times. In the meantime, to placate the peoples clamoring for freedom, Khomeini established a parliament and president. There would be elections and the guise of competition, but no one would be permitted to run for office without approval from the mullahs. This arrangement created the illusion of democracy while maintaining clerical control.

Iranian democracy is like a landscape painted onto a concrete wall in a zoo.Artists skilled in trompe loeil mimic a jungle landscape on the walls of the lion cage, or a polar landscape for a penguin enclosure, with the aim of calming the beasts through a feeling of openness and freedom.But any lion who charges into the concrete jungle or any penguin that leaps into the nearby ocean quickly learns the cruel lesson of his captivity.The Iranian people seem to have realized that they are not free and that their version of democracy is an illusion.

The first indications of their dissatisfaction with the theocracy for which they traded the shah came in the summer of 1999 when university students protested for days, demanding better conditions and greater freedoms. After 9/11 video of spontaneous demonstrations against al Qaeda and terrorism emerged, people with candles and handmade American flags shouted Down with terrorists! in cities across Iran. Eventually those demonstrations subsided, only to be followed by the so-called soccer protests of 2003 where people used the excuse of their teams loss or victory in assemblies that quickly turned into anti-regime demonstrations.

But it was not until the Green Movement of 2009 that the Iranian people turned their attention to the faade of Iranian democracy. Public demonstrations erupted when former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi did not win the presidential election and the mullahs made sure that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad emerged victorious. Mousavi, perhaps a genuine reformer, had slipped through the mullahs selection process. Today he lives under house arrest. Since President Obama spent 2009 courting the mullahs for his 2015 nuclear deal, he not only looked the other way but ordered the CIA to sever contacts with the dissidents supporting and controlling the nascent revolution.

Things are different now. During the height of the recent protests, Secretary of State Mike PompeoMichael (Mike) Richard PompeoHouse leaders: Trump administration asking South Korea to pay more for US troops 'a needless wedge' Trump clarifies US support for Iranian protesters after confusion over previous comment What Congress can't get, the people can: Trump documents are damning and there are more to come MORE tweeted: After 40 years of tyranny, the proud Iranian people are not staying silent about their governments abuses. We will not stay silent either. I have a message for the people of Iran: The United States hears you. The United States supports you. The United States is with you.

In 2009, protesters chanted, Where is my vote? and Give us our votes back. Now there are reports of people shouting, We dont want the ayatollahs! and Death to the dictator! and of people pulling down anti-American banners and billboards. Rioters have burned government buildings, banks and police stations. November 2019 in Iran looked like the revolutionary zeal that brought down Mohammad Reza Pahlavis reign over 40 years ago except now the anger is directed at those responsible for taking down the shah. In fact, some protesters reportedly shouted: Oh, Shah of Iran, come back to Iran.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani may have pronounced the protests over and his regime victorious, but he shouldnt rest too easily. Even President TrumpDonald John TrumpTop Democrat: 'Obstruction of justice' is 'too clear not to include' in impeachment probe Former US intel official says Trump would often push back in briefings Schiff says investigators seeking to identify who Giuliani spoke to on unlisted '-1' number MOREs critics concede that his maximum-pressure sanctions are causing serious pain in Iran, and many believe the regime is in the greatest danger of falling since its inception.

Every day that people openly defy the mullahs in the streets of Iran makes it harder for the clerics to maintain control. If the anti-regime protests continue throughout the winter, can a Persian Spring be far behind?

A.J. Caschetta is a Ginsburg-Ingerman fellow at the Middle East Forum and a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

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Iranian protests were not about the price of gas | TheHill - The Hill