Day: January 3, 2020
Strategic nonsense
Dimitri Trenin has it partly right in a tweet this morning:
If Iran retaliates against #SoleimaniKilled strategically, rather than emotionally, its targets will not be individual US diplomats and various assets in the Middle East, but the very US presence in Iraq & Syria. US vs Iran is a highly asymmetric conflict.
The American government has already urged all Americans to leave Iraq, because of the security risk. That will end most private sector and other civilian US efforts there.
The military presence is also at risk, more for political rather than security reasons. The politics will be overwhelmingly against the US, not only because Soleimani was killed but also because his agent in Iraq, Popular Mobilization Forces leader and Kataib Hizbollah commander al-Muhandis, was also killed, apparently without the permission of or warning to the Iraqi government. An Iraqi government already in turmoil–the prime minister is waiting to be replaced–will now face parliamentary demands to kick the American troops out. That would be a big win for Iran.
The Americans are already mostly out of Syria, which is under Iranian and Russian tutelage. Rather than limiting Iran’s regional power projection, the assassination of Soleimani has opened an opportunity to consolidate its Iraqi link.
But Trenin misses another strategic point: Iran now has an opportunity to ditch the nuclear deal completely and restart its effort to gain all the technology needed for nuclear weapons. The logic is compelling: the Americans feel free to assassinate Iranians because they do not fear Iran’s paltry conventional military capabilities. Hardliners in Tehran don’t even have to be very hardline to argue that getting nuclear weapons would make Washington treat Iran with the respect and deference President Trump accords Kim Jong-un. The Europeans, Russians, and Chinese will be much less likely to come to America’s side on the nuclear issue in the wake of this assassination.
The Trump Administration is arguing that it killed Soleimani because he was plotting to kill more Americans, which is likely correct since he has spent much of the past several decades doing just that. But will this assassination protect Americans? Soleimani will be replaced. Muhandis will be too. Their replacements will be people who can be relied upon to target the United States, one way or another.
It is also being argued (General Keane did it on NPR this morning) that the Americans, having failed to respond to several Iranian provocations in the Gulf, needed to do something to restore deterrence. That makes President Trump’s relatively small mistakes an excuse for a great big one. It was indeed astounding that the Americans did nothing in the aftermath of attacks on Gulf shipping and Saudi oil production facilities. Proportional responses would have been appropriate.
A disproportionate one suggests the Americans think they can break the Iranians. That is doubtful. Iran is in big economic trouble and its people have been protesting against Tehran’s regional adventures. Iraqis have also been protesting the Islamic Republic’s overweening influence in their country. Now those dissenting voices are likely to be muted if not silenced. Iran and Iraq, which in the 1980s fought a ferocious war with each other, are now going to be largely united against the Americans.
These assassinations look to me like precisely what you would expect of a President under siege domestically and looking for a quick win internationally. Tactical success. Strategic nonsense.
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Stevenson’s army, January 3
Columbia Journalism Review has a good collection of commentary on the US assassination of General Suleimani,which I’ll paste below.
Two other points: It’s fortunate that the US military blocked VIP travel to Iraq and Syria starting Dec 16 and supposedly lasting until Jan 15. I’ll be surprised if they allow it any time soon.
Even Turkey delayed sending its troops to Libya until the parliament had authorized it.
In addition to the items linked to below, see this by Heather Hurlburt and this by Dan Byman.
The killing of Qassem Suleimani and the road to war with Iran
By Jon Allsop
In the early hours of the morning, local time, state media in Iraq reported that Qassem Suleimani, Iran’s top security and intelligence official, had been killed in a drone strike at Baghdad’s international airport, along with figures tied to Iran-backed Iraqi militias. In the United States, where it was Thursday night, the news quickly spread, albeit with key details missing; cable news shows and one broadcast network, CBS, cut into their programming with portentous reports that something serious had happened. An hour or so later, the US government confirmed that its military had killed Suleimani at the direction of the president. Trump remained strangely quiet, though he did tweet a picture of an American flag. In response, Iranian officials tweeted their country’s flag, and threats of revenge. Such is the road to war in 2020.
Some context: Suleimani was greatly influential in Iran and widely revered by his countrymen. As head of the Quds Force, an elite unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, he was responsible for Iran’s prodigious maneuvering throughout the Middle East. According to a former operative of the Central Intelligence Agency who spoke to Dexter Filkins in 2013 for The New Yorker, “Suleimani is the single most powerful operative in the Middle East.” In recent years, Suleimani was influential in buttressing the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, and other efforts that cost lives—including those of US troops—in countries from Iraq to Lebanon. According to the New York Times, Trump’s plan to kill Suleimani was initiated last week, after the administration accused an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia of killing an American contractor in an attack on an Iraqi military base. The militia denied involvement; the US bombed some of the militia’s bases anyway. Afterward, when militia members sieged the US embassy in Baghdad (staffers were trapped inside; none were hurt), American officials blamed Suleimani for being the instigator.
Presidents Obama and Bush never took shots to kill Suleimani, fearing war with Iran. Trump went ahead and did it. Does that mean we’re now at war with Iran? Experts’ initial reactions, it seems, have fallen on a spectrum—from let’s keep things in perspective to war is now inevitable to we’re already there. (In The Atlantic, Andrew Exum, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy under Obama, wrote that the killing of Suleimani “doesn’t mean war, it will not lead to war, and it doesn’t risk war. None of that. It is war.”) Two points of consensus emerged: that we are in uncharted territory and that whatever happens next will not be good. “No ‘hot take’ makes any sense now,” Rasha Al Aqeedi of Irfaa Sawtak, a site associated with the US-funded Middle East Broadcasting Networks, wrote. “None of us who work on Iraq closely ever anticipated a scenario without him.”
Nevertheless, hot takes abounded—on Twitter, where everybody suddenly seemed to be an expert on Iran, and in the news. (In particular, a CNBC piece—“America just took out the world’s no. 1 bad guy”—took a lot of heatonline.) Cable shows invited guests with close ties to the military-industrial complex: Fox News hosted Bush stalwarts Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer; MSNBC interviewed Brett McGurk, a diplomat involved in Iraq policy during the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations; CNN had on Max Boot, a Washington Post columnist who was a vocal proponent of the Iraq war. For many progressive commentators, it was all a bit too 2003 for comfort. “Cable news is hard-wired to support war,” Carlos Maza, formerly of Vox, tweeted. “It relies heavily on ex-military, ex-national security people for commentary, and routinely marginalizes anti-war voices.”
Much has changed since the early 2000s, including Boot’s perspective. He has recanted his support for the Iraq war and warned that war with Iran would be worse. Still, as I wrote last year amid escalating tensions between the US and Iran, much mainstream coverage of the countries’ relationship has been too quick to paint Iran as the menacing, unilateral aggressor, and has parroted US government talking points without applying due skepticism.
Last night, as reporters scrambled to fill in the details of Suleimani’s killing, news outlets turned repeatedly to press releases, including the Pentagon’s assurance that the strike on Suleimani “was aimed at deterring future attack plans.” As the Post’s Josh Rogin tweeted, “By the Pentagon’s own logic, if Iran retaliates, the strike mission failed its key goal. Remember that.” That’s sound advice. Already, Iran is promising “harsh retaliation.”
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