Trump Declares War

[muriel_volestrangler]

Qasem Soleimani – a major-general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and the leader of its Quds Force, a unit responsible for external and clandestine operations – was once described by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, as ‘a living martyr of the revolution’. The living martyr is now a dead martyr, killed in an American airstrike along with five other people – reportedly including Naim Qassem, the deputy secretary-general of Lebanese Hizbullah – at Baghdad airport. Khamenei, who promoted Soleimani posthumously to lieutenant-general, has tweeted that ‘harsh vengeance’ is forthcoming; Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Lebanese Hizbullah, has declared that it is the ‘responsibility and task of all resistance fighters worldwide’ to avenge their deaths.
...
What, then, was the tipping point? The storming of the American embassy in Baghdad, only a few months after the Aramco attack, was clearly important: other than personal criticism – or the prospect of impeachment, from which the confrontation provides a useful distraction – nothing enrages Trump so much as spectacles of American weakness. A sense of pique may also have contributed to the assassination order. Soleimani seemed to take pleasure in taunting the Americans. ‘There is not one night we sleep without thinking of you,’ he said in July 2018 on Iranian television. ‘Mr Gambler Trump, we are near you where you don’t expect.’ Trump may have wished to prove to Soleimani that he was near him when he didn’t expect. And Khamenei’s remark, after the storming of the embassy in Baghdad, that ‘you can’t do anything,’ may have been the last straw.

It’s hard to explain Trump’s decision other than as a response to insult, since such a dangerous escalation seems inconsistent with his aversion to foreign wars, and his (so far) unerring sensitivity to his right-wing isolationist base. As Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group remarked on Twitter, killing Soleimani is for all intents and purposes a declaration of war against Iran. It is, of course, possible that Trump is unaware of this, or that he imagines that Iran ‘can’t do anything’ in response and will simply absorb the blow – in which case he is hallucinating.

By killing Soleimani, Trump has not only supplied the Islamic Republic with a powerful casus belli, he has also reinforced its longstanding narrative of martyrdom at the hands of the Great Satan, and may well help to strengthen the supreme leader’s hand at the very moment that the regime is facing popular anti-Iranian protests in Iraq and Lebanon, and reeling from a series of revolts at home in which hundreds of Iranians were killed by security forces. Not for the first time, the American government has proved an objective ally of Iran’s hardliners. The man once known as the living martyr would be smiling.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2020/january/trump-declares-war

Link to tweet

More from Robert Malley:

A Perilous Turning Point in the U.S.-Iran Confrontation

The killing by the U.S. of Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, marks a dramatic turning point. Soleimani had been in Washington’s crosshairs for many years, and successive U.S. presidents could likely have ordered his assassination in the past. That they chose not to do so suggests that they worried the costs would outweigh the benefits. With his decision, President Donald Trump is making clear that he abides by a different calculus: that, given the vast power imbalance, Iran has far more to fear from war than does the U.S. The strike that killed the Iranian general along with others – notably Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a senior commander of the pro-Iranian Iraqi Shiite militia – was, in accordance with this view, meant as a deterrent to further Iranian attacks.

It is almost certain to be anything but. Iran may fear U.S. retaliation, but it fears projecting that fear even more. From its perspective, it cannot allow what it views as a declaration of war to remain unanswered. It will respond and now must decide whether its reaction will be direct or through the array of proxies and allied forces Soleimani helped build; immediate or deferred; in Iraq or elsewhere – in the Gulf, Syria or beyond. The U.S. presence in Iraq, already shaky after the 29 December strike that killed two dozen members of a pro-Iranian Iraqi militia, is now hanging by a thread; the Trump administration may decide to depart preemptively rather than be forced to leave on Baghdad’s orders. The truce in Yemen between Saudi Arabia and Iran-backed Huthi fighters also is in greater jeopardy. Watch in particular for Iran’s announcement of its next steps on the nuclear front, taken in response to Washington’s violation of the 2015 deal. A serious step on 6 January had been predicted; in all likelihood, it just got far more serious.

The U.S.-Iranian game has changed. Their rivalry for the most part played out as an attritional standoff: Washington laying siege to Iran’s economy in hopes that financial duress would lead either to its government’s capitulation to U.S. demands or to its ouster; and Tehran responding with actions that maintained a veneer of plausible deniability. Targeting Soleimani is liable to mark a shift from attrition toward open confrontation.

In short, a U.S. president who repeatedly claimed that he does not wish to drag the country into another Middle East war has just brought that war one step closer. And a U.S. administration that argues it killed the Iranian general in order to avert further attacks just made those attacks more likely. Iran will retaliate; the U.S. will avenge the retaliation; and many across the region will pay the price.

https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/gulf-and-arabian-peninsula/iran/perilous-turning-point-us-iran-confrontation

[Stuart G]

1. K and R