World

SOLEIMANI KILLING

Is it all downhill from here for the US and Iran?

Is it all downhill from here for the US and Iran?
Pakistani Shiite Muslims hold pictures of General Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' elite Quds Force, during a protest against the US, in Islamabad, Pakistan, 05 January 2020. General Qasem Soleimani, was killed in an airstrike on 03 January, in Baghdad ordered by the United States president, the Pentagon said. General Soleimani was in charge of Iran's foreign policy strategy as the head of the Quds Force, an elite wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the US designated as a terror organization. The Quds Force holds sway over a raft of Shia militias across the region, from Lebanon to Syria and Iraq. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Sohail Shahzad)

Given the quick uptick in tension between the US and Iran following a drone strike killing of an Iranian general, we sadly shifted from our planned story on a wide range of global prospects and turned to the Iran-US confrontation instead.

If I Only Had a Plan!

I could while away the hours
Conferrin’ with the flowers
Consultin’ with the rain
And my head, I’d be scratchin’
While my thoughts were busy hatchin’
If I only had a brain.
I’d unravel every riddle
For any individ’le
In trouble or in pain.
With the thoughts you’d be thinkin’
You could be another Lincoln
If you only had a brain.
Oh, I would tell you why
The ocean’s near the shore
I could think of things I never thunk before
And then I’d sit and think some more.
I would not be just a nuffin’
My head all full of stuffin’
My heart all full of pain
I would dance and be merry
Life would be a ding-a-derry
If I only had a brain.
Gosh, it would be awful pleasin’
To reason out the reason
For things I can’t explain.
Then perhaps I’ll deserve ya
And be even worthy of ya
If I only had a brain…

Music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Yip Harberg, from The Wizard of Oz.

Back in the late 1930s, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow, together, teamed up with Dorothy and her dog, Toto, to find the Emerald City so that each of them could ask the fabled Wizard of Oz to grant them their deepest desires: a way home to Kansas; a heart; some courage; and, of course, a brain. But the wizard was a fraud, and the travellers’ plan was only achievable by their own honest efforts.

The Wizard of Oz, then, may stand as a metaphor for the Trump administration’s flawed efforts to guide, direct, and, ultimately, control history. But crucially, this also comes absent any understanding of where they are — or, even, in a concrete sense, where they want to be with regard to American-Iranian relations. What the future holds is both threatening and unclear.

Without reprising the entire history of US-Persian/Iranian relations, the vast majority of Americans only first encountered word of Iran in the middle of World War II. The main Allied leaders, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, met in Iran’s capital of Tehran in late 1943 to plan strategy for the future of the war, and as a modest contingent of American military personnel were managing a rail line from the Persian Gulf coast to Russian territory in order to deliver vital war material to that nation.

In the aftermath of the war, the Soviet Union’s continued occupation of northern Persia was one of the early indicators of Cold War trouble up ahead. Perhaps forgotten by most people nowadays, Britain and Czarist Russia had both proclaimed zones of influence over much of Persia, pre-World War I, just as that country’s petroleum reserves were beginning to be discovered.

By 1953, a coup, led by a group of disaffected generals, either at the instigation of, or with some very substantial support from British and American intelligence operatives, overthrew Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, presumably as part of efforts to forestall the nationalisation of oil reserves, facilities, and drilling operations from foreign, mainly British, control. Iran’s young royal, an increasingly assertive Shah Reza Pahlavi, then increasingly gained control over Iran. In his policies, he encouraged foreign investment, pushed forward a modernised educational system, and aimed to lessen the social and economic control of the rural hinterland by the clergy, by embarking upon a campaign of land reform and redistribution.

The often violent, politically repressive climate of the Shah’s rule, however, increasingly generated opposition from both rural religious populations as well as an increasingly cosmopolitan, educated urban middle class that felt locked out of the country’s political life. By the late 1970s, the long-exiled religious figure, Ayatollah Khomeini, was planning a return. Soon after his arrival his supporters decisively crushed the more secular political aspirations of the urban elites, including adherents of leftist and socialist politics.

Groups of young Khomeini followers seized the American Embassy, eventually holding 52 diplomats and support staff for more than a year until a deal was struck with incoming US President Ronald Reagan. This event helped definitively in sealing the hostility and breakdown in US-Iranian relations that has largely been in place since 1980.

In the latter years of the Obama administration — in the wake of growing consternation about Iran’s apparent efforts to become a nuclear weapons-capable state, married to its growing competence with missile technology — the US, China, Russia, the UK, France and Germany reached an accord with Iran. This agreement was designed to restrict Iranian nuclear development efforts for years into the future, in association with IAEA (the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency) inspections. In return, western economic sanctions would begin rolling back, allowing easier economic circumstances for the increasingly severely straitened Iranian economy. (Iranian oil output has dropped from 2.7 million barrels a day by 2017 to around just a half-million barrels a day now.)

Amid this, the Iranian military, principally the Quds Force headed by General Qasem Soleimani, has continued its military support for the Houthi rebellion in Yemen, support for various Syrian fighters and Palestinian militias largely under the Hezbollah umbrella, as well as powerful militias in Iraq, drawing from the Shia branch of Islam — as Iranian influence has continued to grow in that nation. Iran’s broader struggle for pre-eminence in the region against Saudi Arabia thus has continued, most recently with the attack on oilfield facilities inside Saudi Arabia, and a reported (and unsuccessful) effort to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump had come into office in 2017, decrying the six-power Iran accord as the worst international agreement ever, presumably because it did not force Iran to renounce missile technology or efforts to achieve regional geopolitical, strategic hegemony. (He had also campaigned on drawing down US military forces across the Middle East and Central Asia.)

On the basis of his criticism of the Iran accord, Trump vacated American participation in it and tightened economic and financial sanctions on Iran instead. The assumption was Iran could be bludgeoned into submission, ignoring its history as an intensely proud civilisation with an acute awareness of that long list of grievances vis-a-vis the US, even if many Iranians had also been prepared to go to the streets in recent weeks to protest against their own government’s repressive ways and flailing economy.

In recent months, a series of attacks in Iraq have been laid at the foot of Iran’s Quds Force, and thus ultimately at the command of General Qasem Soleimani. There have been attacks on American outposts in that nation that had killed an American interpreter contractor, that attack on the Saudi oil facilities, attacks on several ships in the Strait of Hormuz, and the downing of a US surveillance drone (over international waters or Iranian waters, depending on how one holds the map, perhaps). Most recently there was that dangerous, but mostly symbolic, attack on the outer perimeter of the US Embassy compound in Baghdad as well.

Concurrently, the US intel community had been tracking Soleimani’s whereabouts, and now found him on the last leg of a trip to catch up with allies in Syria and Iraq. Finding him near Baghdad’s airport, US forces called in a drone strike that killed him as well as Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an Iraqi citizen who effectively led an umbrella of militias in Iraq dominated by groups aligned with Iran. (It is entirely possible Americans had forgotten Soleimani had also been a key figure in rallying Iraqi resistance against ISIS, in an informal league with the US several years back.)

 

The decision made by the president to kill the Iranian came after being presented with a range of options to respond to the contractor’s death and the violence at the embassy. Military leaders have anonymously expressed their consternation and astonishment to the media that Trump went right to the maximum force option, rather than any of the more limited actions. There is even speculation his choice was a consequence of not wishing to appear weak as the US presidential election begins to come ever closer. In this regard, he apparently feels a need to appear strong and resolute, in comparison to the Obama administration in the aftermath of the Benghazi incident that cost the life of an American ambassador, or in comparison with the sad circumstances of President Jimmy Carter who had been unable to rescue those US diplomatic hostages.

So far, at least, the killing of the Iranian general has been defended by Trump administration officials as an entirely justifiable pursuit of a dangerous terrorist plotter on the verge of launching yet more fiendish attacks on Americans, American facilities, and US allies in the region. Moreover, the Quds Force and the Revolutionary Guards had already been listed on an official US terrorism list, so this act was even more justifiable. But real details of the decision’s rationale have been excessively scanty.

The challenge in an international legal sense is that, so far, the Trump administration has been loath to make a detailed, persuasive case publicly, or to the US Congress, let alone to American allies (including even the Iraqi government which surely has a dog in this particular fight), although the president did apparently speak to Russia’s president. Given his propensity for embellishing or flat out trafficking in lies and falsehoods, the onus surely is now on Trump to prove assertions about something that could — and is already — being portrayed by others around the globe as a clear violation of international law, or even a war crime.

At this point, with Soleimani’s remains being accorded a martyr’s return in Iran, and Iran and the US mutually threatening retaliation, counter-retaliation and counter-counter- retaliation, both sides are also mouthing the idea that neither really wants a wider war. In a bizarre statement amid all this mutual chest-thumping, Donald Trump threatened to attack 52 Iranian sites, including important cultural ones, apparently in memory of the number of US diplomatic hostages years ago. The equally intemperate Iranian response was to say that if that happened, America would face attacks on hundreds of its sites.

The latest wrinkle in all this has been a vote in the Iraqi parliament to call on the government to negotiate with the US to entirely remove its military presence from that battered nation. This kind of outcome cannot possibly be a result effectively planned or hoped for by the Trump administration. Trying to figure out the actual strategy of the Americans at this point seems almost impossible. What did Trump officials actually think they wanted to achieve, how would they get there, and what would the long-term costs be from all this? A friend in the US tried to explain it by saying it was because of the squirrels running around in Trump’s head.

Given the growing chaos between the US and Iran, I am now bringing together all my books on the origins of the fighting in 1914 that came about on the basis of misunderstandings, diplomatic failure and military intransigence. Collectively they may be helpful in understanding things — if the current US-Iranian confrontation goes south. DM

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