Month: January 2020
Stevenson’s army, January 6
-WaPo says SecState Pompeo has been pushing for months to escalate against Iran and kill Suleimani.
-SecDef Esper drastically limited group involved in Suleimani planning.
– US military has halted counter-ISIS operations.
– Speaker Pelsoi says House will vote on war powers measure on Iran similar to one offered by Sen. Tim Kaine [D-Va].
– Iran has announced end of compliance with Iran nuclear deal but will allow IAEA inspections to continue.
– Maduro seized control of national assembly by blocking entry of pro-Guaido members.
– Yahoo News has long story on intelligence community’s problems protecting its spies in a digital age.
– WaPo’s media columnist, Margaret Sullivan, has suggestions for those not already in the far-right echo chamber to follow what matters there. Among other sites she recommends The RIghting and RightRichter. Surf away.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. If you want to get it directly, To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Stevenson’s army, January 4 and 5
January 5
– Iran says it has 35 targets within range for possible retaliation, prompting President Trump to say the US has 52 targets. Who will blink first?
– NYT now confirms what LA Times reported yesterday, that Trump’s choice of assassination option greatly surprised his advisers. NYT says Trump wanted to hit Suleimani after contractor was killed in Kirkuk but deferred until evidence of imminent attack could be found. Some sources call evidence “razor thin.”
– WH sent war powers notification to Congress, but kept whole text classified.
– Former adviser Emma Sky says US strike hurts US-Iraq relationship.
– NYT says killing also strengthens ISIS.
-Good article in Atlantic on likely Iranian actions. Note links to CRS report saying most Iranian actions against US since 1979 have been by proxies and IISS analysis of Iranian strategy and a global military power site.
– On the political front, Atlantic has good piece arguing that Trump has done well with congressional Republicans by charming personal contact, an unreported practice. And it’s true that Obama did little in that regard with Rs or Ds.
January 4
Jonathan Swan of Axios has reported that the three more persuasive
arguments to use with President Trump are: 1. It’s the biggest ever. 2.
It’s never been done before. 3. Obama did the opposite. The Suleimani
assassination ticks all three.
– WaPo describes the weekend meetings in Florida when Trump demands prompt action.
-LA Times says Trump’s advisers were surprised by his support for the assassination option.
– NYT emphasizes the final authorization, when the operation might have been called off if Iraqi officials were part of the convoy.
– An earlier NYT story discusses refusals by G.W. Bush and Obama to kill Suleimani because of the likely consequences.
– WaPo foresees a cyber attack as the most likely Iranian response. DHS says it’s ready.
– Iraq is likely to demand withdrawal of US forces.
– WaPo notes earlier polling on US public opinion on a conflict with Iran.
– Lawfare writers say the situation is very complex under both domestic and international law.
– VP Pence misleadingly tweeted that Suleimani “assisted” the 9/11 hijackers.
– My take: the action was probably legal — and probably unwise.
And in political analysis, Lee Drutman argues that the Framers worried about precisely the political polarization we now have. Is proportional representation the best answer?
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. If you want to get it directly, To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Marching towards different wars
Both Iran and the United States are signaling escalation in the wake of the assassination of Quds force commander Qasem Soleimani. Tehran said it had identified 35 targets. President Trump responded with a tweet threat against 52:
Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!
Both have the capability, and perhaps the will. It all sounds strikingly symmetrical.
But there the parallel ends. The wars they are contemplating are different. Iran can hit 35 US targets, but only using proxy forces in other countries or cyber attacks. The US can hit 52 sites, but only with stand-off weapons like drones and cruise missiles, in addition to cyber attacks. That I suspect makes cyber attacks less likely: the Americans presumably have the greater capability in that domain, but they also have far more to lose if the Iranians prove even marginally competent. Will Tehran care much if its citizens don’t have internet access?
Neither the US nor Iran wants a traditional ground war. The Iranians because they would lose, should the Americans deploy the kind of force they did in attacking Iraq in 2003. But that isn’t happening. The American electorate is not prepared to support that kind of effort, and the Administration has done nothing to try to mobilize it. President Trump can deploy a few thousand additional troops to the Middle East to protect American embassies and other facilities, but hundreds of thousands are not in the cards.
Trump is hoping his threats of escalation will bring Iran to the negotiating table, where he hopes to get a “better” agreement than President Obama’s nuclear deal. It’s the North Korea gambit: loud threats, some action, then hugs and kisses. If that fails, he will try a stand-off and cyber attack. If he has a game plan beyond that, he has kept it a good secret. He has so far been unwilling to loosen sanctions, which is what the Iranians want.
The Iranians are fighting on different battlefields. They may threaten proxy and cyber attacks, and even indulge in some, but their better bets are forcing the US troops out of Iraq (there is an advisory vote tomorrow on that in the Iraqi parliament) and acquiring all the material and technology they need to build nuclear weapons. Kim Jong-un got respect once he had nukes. Why shouldn’t the Supreme Leader expect the same?
Nothing about American intervention in the Middle East in the past two decades has brought much more than grief to the United States. Trillions of dollars and thousands of American deaths later, we have accomplished little. Iran has gained from the removal of arch-rival Saddam Hussein, protected its ally Bashar al Assad from insurgency, strengthened its position on Israel’s northern borders, and helped the Houthis in Yemen to harass Saudi Arabia.
President Trump had it right when he ran in 2016 on avoiding new Middle East wars and bringing American troops home. But that requires a serious strategy and commitment to diplomacy and alliances that he has been unwilling to make. Now he risks getting the Americans sent home and confronting an Iran that has nuclear capabilities. You tell me who is fighting on the right battlefield.
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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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Escalation dominance
No American should mourn Qassem Suleimani, but his death at the hands of the US requires careful consideration of the consequences. By killing the commander of the Iranian Quds Force, the US has jumped many rungs of the escalation ladder in its confrontation with Iran, which had already heated up with US attacks on Iraqi militia forces earlier in the week. The Administration is betting that Tehran will recognize that the US is so dominant that it can gain little by responding. Washington is also signaling that it is prepared to withdraw its forces from Iraq, since that is a possible, perhaps likely, political consequence.
The first proposition is dubious. Iran prides itself on resistance to the US and has the capability to do serious harm to American interests in the Middle East and beyond. While it may be difficult for Tehran to kill an American military commander, it is not unthinkable. Nor is such a mirror image attack the only possibility. Iran and its proxies have killed many Americans in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Tehran has capabilities that extend throughout the Middle East and into Europe, Latin America, and even the American heartland.
Ultimately US military power is vastly greater than Iran’s, which is piddling by comparison. But the US public is far from ready for a war with Iran in which we might lose thousands if not tens of thousands of troops and civilians, not to mention ships and planes. When it comes to breaking the will to fight, Iran is likely to be able to absorb far more punishment than the US. As many as half a million Iranians died in the eight-year Iran/Iraq war. Fewer than 7000 Americans have been killed since 2001 in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The killing of Iraqi Kataib Hizbollah commander al-Muhandis along with Suleimani puts the Iraqi government in a particularly difficult spot. No doubt there are lots of Iraqis who won’t mourn al-Muhandis in private, as he left a swathe of death and destruction, especially but not only among Sunnis. He had impeccable terrorist credentials from his time in Kuwait in the 1980s, but he was also credited by many Iraqis with helping to fight off and defeat the Islamic State after 2015. Besides, deadly American military action without Iraqi consent on Iraqi soil against Iraqi citizens can please few Iraqi politicians in public.
US withdrawal from Iraq, if that is what Iraqi politics are going to demand, would be a big prize for Iran, which seeks client states there and in Syria that will give it strategic depth and on-the-ground access to its Hizbollah proxies in Lebanon as well as proximity to the Israeli border. Like the US, Iran seeks to confront its adversaries outside its borders rather than inside. US withdrawal would enable it to do that and consolidate its projection of power all the way to the Mediterranean.
So President Trump has thrown the dice, betting that Iran will break and that Iraq won’t throw the Americans out. It may be churlish, but true, to mention that he got elected on pledges to avoid new conflicts in the Middle East. Not to mention that war with Iran is nowhere in the current Congressional Authorization to Use Military Force. It might almost make you think the President is trying to distract attention from the Senate’s impending impeachment trial. It wouldn’t be the first time he has taken a big risk for little apparent gain. Nor would it be the first time he put his personal electoral interests ahead of the nation’s security.
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