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Mourners attend a
funeral ceremony for Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani and his comrades
in Ahvaz, Iran, on Sunday. (Morteza Jaberian/Mehr News
Agency/AP)
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Over the weekend, thousands of
mourners in cities in Iraq and Iran participated in funeral
processions for Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, a prominent Iranian
commander. He was a
Washington boogeyman, implicated in years of chaos and bloodshed.
But the theocratic regime and its allies cast his death — the
result of a U.S. drone strike on a convoy carrying him and a
number of other prominent pro-Iranian militia leaders out of
Baghdad’s international airport early Friday — as a martyrdom,
the heroic sacrifice of an icon of “resistance” whose influence
and supposed charisma helped stitch together a network of
pro-Tehran proxy groups throughout the Middle East.
Iran’s leadership vowed “severe
revenge,” though many analysts suspect the regime will bide its
time before mustering a violent reprisal. Instead, it basked in a surge of nationalist sentiment and anger at
home. Less than two months ago, security forces are said to have killed hundreds of Iranian protesters to quell an
uprising spurred by the regime’s dysfunctional management of
the country’s crippled economy. On Sunday, hundreds of thousands
of Iranians poured into the streets of Iranian cities to mourn a
fallen hero and decry the “imperialist” power that killed him.
President Trump helped stoke the
flames even further with a tweet threatening the destruction of Iranian
cultural sites — what most international legal scholars would
tell you is a war crime — should the regime seek vengeance for
the death of Soleimani.
“At a time when his unprecedented
sanctions had stirred unrest inside Iran, the political elite has
just been handed a rallying cry,” wrote Mohammad Ali Shabani, a researcher at
Soas University in London. “The strike on Suleimani, whose status
approached that of national icon, will harden popular sentiment
against the U.S. while simultaneously shoring up the regime.”
On Sunday, Iran made its fifth announcement about
winding down its obligations to the 2015 nuclear deal. Iranian
authorities said that they would no longer abide by restrictions
on uranium enrichment, but would return to their previous
commitments should the United States withdraw the sanctions whose
imposition were also a violation of the pact. The announcement
had been expected before Soleimani’s assassination but took on a
darker cast as tensions mounted.
In Iraq, too, the backlash was
swift. The country’s parliament voted on Sunday to ask for the
removal of U.S. troops on Iraqi soil. The resolution was nonbinding
and “did not immediately imperil the U.S. presence in Iraq,”
wrote The Post’s Erin Cunningham, “but it highlights the head
winds the Trump administration faces after the strike, which was
seen in Iraq as a violation of sovereignty and as a dangerous
escalation by governments across the Middle East.”
For President Trump and some of
the Washington foreign policy establishment, though, it still may
be worth it. In Trump’s
words, Soleimani was “the number one terrorist in the world,” the
mastermind behind a generation of asymmetric warfare in the
region, as well as various plots against America. In briefings with reporters, U.S. officials
justified the targeted killing of Soleimani as an act of
“deterrence” based on intelligence that the senior leader was
planning a number of “imminent” possible attacks on U.S.
interests. But other officials, speaking on the condition of
anonymity to my colleagues and other outlets, suggested that the evidence of
Soleimani’s direct involvement was “razor thin” and that Trump had chosen
the most extreme path of retaliation after pro-Iran militiamen
ransacked sections of the U.S. Embassy in Iraq last week.
Soleimani was the head of the Quds
Force, a wing of Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps that steers the regime’s proxies in Iraq, Syria,
Lebanon and elsewhere. These factions have been locked in months
of shadow conflict with the United States and its allies in the
wake of Trump’s reimposition of sweeping sanctions on Iran after
quitting the Obama-era nuclear deal.
On one hand, the Trump
administration believes its “maximum pressure” campaign against
Iran is working and that killing Soleimani adds to the regime’s
internal strains. But Iran’s destabilizing activities in the
region — a key reason cited by Trump for reneging on the
nonproliferation pact — have only spiked in recent months, including
alleged attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq, shipping in the
Persian Gulf and a major Saudi oil facility.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
declared the world a “safer place” after Soleimani’s death. But the path ahead remains deeply
treacherous. “My sense is that we will see an escalation in
Iraq,” said Maha Yahya, director of the Carnegie Middle East
Center, to my colleague Liz Sly. “But I don’t think
the Iranians really want a war with the U.S. I don’t think they
are interested in an all-out regional conflict. The problem is
that all it takes is one small error and the whole region would
be engulfed."
Amid the crisis, the United States
ordered American citizens to leave Iraq and suspended its
military cooperation and training programs with Iraqi security
forces. The latter action risks undermining the ongoing effort to
defeat the extremist Islamic State. And the Trump administration
has hardly rallied a united front to its cause, with Pompeo bemoaning how European allies — who are
trying to keep afloat the gutted husk of the nuclear deal — were
“not helpful” enough.
“For European capitals,” wrote Ellie Geranmayeh of the European Council on
Foreign Relations, “this means their worst predictions — they
warned the Trump administration that withdrawing from the Iran
nuclear deal would trigger a chain of escalation with Iran — are
becoming reality.” |
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