Last night's campaign rally, in which Trump offered the new explanation that Iran was preparing to "blow up" our embassy in Iraq, provides a clue to the White House's dilemma. The story about "blowing up" the embassy is far-fetched. If there was clear intelligence establishing that fact, why would it not have been shared with members of Congress at yesterday's briefing? But the mention of the embassy is telling. The penultimate "move" in the escalating game of chicken that led to Soleimani's death was the assault on our Baghdad embassy by Iranian proxies. Why would this have invited the assassination, and why will the White House not be candid about its reasons?
The assault on the embassy itself was shocking, and deliberately so. The Shi'ite militias that carried it out were almost certainly acting on Qasem Soleimani's orders. They left graffiti bearing his name (news organizations have variously reported graffiti declaring "Soleimani passed through here" or "Soleimani is our commander"). The messages themselves were most likely left at his deliberate instructions. Indeed, Soleimani was killed as he was arriving in Baghdad, where he was met by the commander of the Shi'ite militias that had executed the embassy assault (Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who was also killed), so the assault and its aftermath were obviously on his agenda.
The embassy assault was thus almost certainly the provocation that incited Soleimani's assassination. We know that the drone attack against the Iranian general was only the most extreme option of several offered to Trump by his national security team. Why would the embassy assault drive Trump to the riskiest end of that spectrum, and why can he not coherently explain his decision in its aftermath?
There are two explanations for this, which are not mutually exclusive of one-another. The first is that the taunting intent of the embassy assault was so enraging to Donald Trump that he struck out at his tormentor, heedless of the potential consequences. This explanation is persuasive because Trump seems to have been surprised by the violent outpouring of grief and rage unleashed in Iran by Soleimani's death. The president does not seem to have been aware of his target's political profile, suggesting that he might have been focused on the degree to which he had been personally insulted by Soleimani. To the extent that this explanation bears out, it is easy to understand why the administration would be reticent to be fully candid about the decision making process that led to Soleimani's death. It would not be politically advantageous to Donald Trump to admit that he unwittingly risked all-out war with a nation of 80 million people over what was effectively a "pissing contest."
At the same time, however, we know that the assassination of Soleimani was strongly urged by hawkish advisors like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and their reasons for countering the embassy assault with an attack on Soleimani are likely to have been more complex. Though it only penetrated an outer "reception area" of the Baghdad embassy (the largest US foreign mission in the world) and inflicted no casualties, the message of the embassy assault must have been deeply disturbing to the entire diplomatic and national security apparatus of the US government. The embassy itself still sits within a larger fortified area known as the "Green Zone," thus to penetrate into even the low-stakes reception area of the embassy the militia assailants would have needed the complete complicity of the Iraqi government and US-trained Iraqi military. The message that Qasem Soleimani sent was clear: "We can reach you anywhere in Iraq, our influence is all-pervasive. You persist here at our sufferance." The evocations of Benghazi and the 1979 hostage crisis was thunderously blatant.
Given the clarity of that message, the thought process of someone like Mike Pompeo is easy to reconstruct. The only thing that could buy US diplomats and military personnel any modicum of security in the wake of such a provocation was to ratchet the stakes maximally high. The message had to be sent: "You may be able to reach us anywhere in Iraq, but if you do, the retaliation will be devastating." Soleimani's death was thus conceived as a means of "brushback," done out of the sheer necessity to call Tehran's bluff or fold.
This of course raises the question: if the imperatives for Soleimani's assassination were so clear, why is the Trump administration not being candid about them? Why resort to fables like an uncorroborated bomb plot? Here again an obvious answer suggests itself: if the administration discloses its strongest motives for the death of Soleimani, it admits the extreme vulnerability of the US position in Iraq. The embassy assault demonstrated that after almost seventeen years of military engagement and trillions of dollars spent, America continues to skate on very thin ice in Iraq. Throwing a spotlight on that fact can only invite both strategic and political mayhem.
American administrations have had the opportunity to kill Soleimani since he became the leader of the Quds Force in 1998. The recent crisis demonstrated why no prior president seized upon such opportunities: the act was the last possible step before (and unavoidably risked) all-out war. The invasion of Iraq taught us what such a war would mean. Though US forces would destroy the combat capabilities of the Iranian military very quickly, in a nation that has almost 3X as many people as Iraq, the aftermath of a full-blown war would be long, painful, tragic, and unpredictable- for Iran, the US, and the entire world.
In opting to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and initiating its "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran, the Trump Administration set off a slowly escalating chain of provocations and counter-provocations leading to the point at which the assassination of Qasem Soleimani became appealing. Having broken the glass, pulled that lever, and assumed all of the risks it entails, they are left with very little to show for it. Iran is no less likely to develop a nuclear weapon. The regime in Tehran is no less secure, either at home or abroad.
We have been presented with an empirical lesson in the limits of confrontation with Iran. The Trump administration does not seem disposed to learn from that lesson, and even if it did, there is little time between now and November for them to develop an alternative policy, given the complexity of the situation they helped create. If the "maximum pressure" campaign has taught us anything, it is that the regime can survive the worst economic and diplomatic punishment that we can inflict, and that we are not willing to resort to the degree of military force necessary to redeem the failure of such sanctions. The Obama administration had admittedly only explored the nearest edges of the frontier of diplomacy, but Trump has taken us to the very end of the path of coercion, and proven that it leads nowhere. It is time to tack back and try the other path again. Hopefully the next election will give us an administration possessed of the skill, imagination, and patience to forge a new path forward, in both Iran and the Middle East at large.
6 comments:
A simpler explanation would be that the administration wanted to restore deterrence, something that had been undermined in the last several months, the attack on the embassy as only the latest act, but the last straw as the administration saw it. So, they sent a message to the Iranians that the US can reach anyone it wants anytime it wants to do so. And, that also has the advantage of making clear that Iran is, in reality, a weak and, generally speaking, technologically backwards country such that the US could, if it really wanted to, role back Iranian influence.
Whether that is what the administration was really thinking, I obviously don't know. Your theory, however, gives the Iranian government power it never had and is unlikely to achieve. And, it assumes that the administration really cares what the Iranian people think. The almost for sure truth is that the US government could care less about that.
What the US government most likely wants is for the Iranian government to restrain itself. While I do not doubt that the Iranians will try at some point to exact greater revenge than they have so far sought, for now they seem to have received a message sufficiently clear that they lied to their own people about the effectiveness of their attack. As you may have read, Iranian news reported that 80 American were killed in the attack.
I am not saying that the policy adopted by the US is wise. I am merely attempting to get at what they likely were thinking.
Niles,
Again thank you for reading and for your thoughtful comments.
Certainly deterrence was a motive for Soleimani's assassination- saying so doesn't contradict my point. But the search for deterrence does not explain the choice for assassination over other options. There were plenty of targets throughout the region that would have dealt a blow to Iranian interests without sending millions of Iranians into the street in grief and rage, demanding revenge. The risk of outright war had deterred past administrations from killing Soleimani. My essay seeks to explore what had changed in the strategic calculations of this administration to make its choices different than what had prevailed in the past.
As for my having attributed to the Iranian government power it never had, yes, Iran is a weak country relative to America. But the embassy assault proved that (thanks to Iran's disproportionate influence with the current government in Iraq) its proxies can get to US personnel even in the most secure places they live and work, and if they grew desperate enough the Iranians could touch off another "hostage crisis" that would produce a stalemate like 1979.
Has the assassination of Soleimani made the Iranian's any less likely to use that power? In the short term, perhaps yes. But Tehran is as likely to stand down in Iraq because it is under less political pressure to be confrontational as its fear of US reprisals. A month ago the mullahs were faced with massive political dissent in both Iraq and at home, and it was those political woes that led them to mortar attacks and embassy assaults (by way of trying to pressure the US back to the bargaining table). Now that, thanks to Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo, the political situation of the regime has stabilized, they can afford to ease up on their campaign of provocations in Iraq.
We put a scare into the mullahs, but we also showed them that we have as little interest in a total war as they do. I have no doubt that the US government wants the Iranians to restrain themselves, just as I have no doubt that in the long term, if they pursue the same course, they will be disappointed in that desire. The fact that the Iranian media told its people that 80 deaths were inflicted by its missile strikes is the first indication of that fact.
Many people in Iran undoubtedly know the “80 deaths” claim is BS. Why, then, can the regime be so confident to put out such a lie? Donald Trump warned that if the Iranians retaliated for Soleimani's death, 52 targets in Iran would be hit. The Iranian's retaliated, and Trump's empty threat fizzled. Whether there was any harm inflicted by the Iranian strike or not, most Iranians will be satisfied that Soleimani has been avenged- that is the significance of the "80 deaths" canard. The weak, technologically unsophisticated country of Iran fired missiles at the greatest superpower on earth, told it to do nothing, AND WE OBEYED.
Trump has done nothing to restrain the Iranians or to decrease their influence in the long run. Quite the contrary. We will see if any of the more dire possibilities play out (a forced withdrawal of the US from Iraq, increased Iranian influence in Syria and Lebanon, etc.). Maybe they will, maybe they won't. At the very best, however, we have reset the game at square one, from which it will proceed to play out as before if we insist on pursuing the same coercive strategy. Hopefully we won't have to endure a re-run of the show we just watched (please forgive the mixed metaphor) past next January 20.
You write: "Many people in Iran undoubtedly know the “80 deaths” claim is BS. Why, then, can the regime be so confident to put out such a lie?" This morning, on NPR's Morning Edition, it was noted that someone in Iran got into trouble by indicating that Soleimani was killed when, in Iran, you are required to say he was martyred. In other words, information is tightly controlled in Iran in ways that are difficult for people from more open societies to understand. That, plus the fact that those in Iran likely to know the facts speak foreign languages such as English. That is a comparatively small group but it is the group with outsized association with Western reporters who confuse them for the average Iranian (i.e., basically, the blindman describing the elephant by means of touching some portion of that animal).
Niles,
Your NPR story suggests that speech is tightly controlled, which is different than saying that information is tightly controlled. Authoritarian regimes (which the Iranian government definitely is) routinely sanction the way people express themselves- it is a basic mechanism of control. But forcing people to talk a certain way does not completely determine the way they might think or perceive. I would be willing to bet that the truth about the rocket attack is more widely known in Iran than we might suppose, though few people will talk about it openly. We are living in the information age, after all. Whether that is true or not, we can be sure of one thing- the fact that the "80 deaths" canard is not being contested is a measure of the degree to which Trump's "maximum pressure" campaign has unraveled thanks to the assassination of Soleimani. Just a few weeks ago Iranians were pouring into the streets to express their discontent with the leadership in Tehran- the regime killed hundreds in an attempt to tamp down dissent. Earlier this week millions were out in the street demanding revenge for Soleimani, so unhinged in their grief and rage that dozens were trampled to death. If today there are no protests in the street calling for more action from the government, we can infer that the Iranian public is satisfied with their leaders' response to Soleimani's assassination, whether they believe the particulars of the regime's story or not.
This is not a great mystery.
My wife's family is from the USSR, which lied about pretty much everything. And, that was known by most people but, at the same time, it was not fully appreciated. Or, to put it a bit differently, many believed the lies, even while knowing that what was being said was not really true. (I might add, as shown in Walter Laqueur's stellar book, The Terrible Secret, knowledge about the Shoah was widely known in Germany and in the West but knowing something and appreciating what is known are not the same thing, enough so that people who knew could more or less believe that they did not know things that they actually knew.)
In Iran, saying that they killed 80 Americans is a way for the regime to save face. It communicates that the regime got its revenge so that people can return to their normal lives. Elites in the country will probably understand that what was said is likely a lie. But, once you leave that rather small group of people and consider those who are the true base of the country, they don't speak English or other foreign languages. They believe their regime over what outsiders say or what they hear as rumors from Westernized people among their population or on the Internet. They may even know that the 80 person claim is an exaggeration but they get the point, which is that Iran got its revenge.
Niles,
You just basically reiterated my point- which is that some people probably do believe the "80 deaths" claim, others don't. In either case the point is moot, since the lack of civil unrest signals that, in general, both believers and skeptics are satisfied that Iran has exacted due revenge for Soleimani's death.
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