Suleimani Died as He Had Killed
Now the United States must establish a balance of hope
and fear in the Middle East.
Opinion
Columnist
·
Jan. 3, 2020
Reasonable people will debate the
likeliest ramifications of President Trump’s decision to order the killing of
Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the Revolutionary Guards Corps commander whose
power in Iran was second only to that of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei — and whose power in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq was arguably second to
none.
What shouldn’t be in doubt is the
justice.
By far the best account of Suleimani’s life was
written by Dexter Filkins for The New Yorker in 2013. It’s worth reprising some
of the details.
In 1998, Suleimani assumed command of
the Quds Force — the Guards’ extraterritorial terrorist wing — whose prior
exploits included a role in the bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos
Aires that killed 85 people.
In
2003, Filkins wrote, “Americans received intelligence that Al Qaeda fighters in
Iran,” operating with Tehran’s protection and consent, “were preparing an
attack on Western targets in Saudi Arabia.” Despite U.S. warnings to Iran,
terrorists “bombed three residential compounds in Riyadh, killing 35 people,
including 9 Americans.”
In 2004, Suleimani “began flooding Iraq
with lethal roadside bombs” known as explosively formed projectiles, which,
according to retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, “killed hundreds of Americans.”
In 2005, the former Lebanese prime
minister, Rafik Hariri, and 21 others were killed in a massive car bombing in
Beirut, carried out by Hezbollah. “There were Iranians on the phones directing
the attack,” one former C.I.A. official told Filkins. “If indeed Iran was
involved, Suleimani was undoubtedly at the center of this.”
In 2006, Hezbollah operatives abducted
and killed Israeli soldiers in an operation that, according to Filkins, was
“carried out with Suleimani’s help.” It sparked a monthlong war in which
thousands of people were killed.
There’s a great deal more of this. And
that was just the preamble to his central role in rescuing Syria’s Bashar
al-Assad and sustaining Yemen’s Houthi militia in power, goals pursued through
policies of unrestricted brutality. As an agent of international mayhem,
Suleimani’s peers were Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. To think of
him as a worthy adversary — an Iranian Erwin Rommel — is wrong. He was an evil
man who died as he had killed so many others.
The
proximate reason for Suleimani’s killing, according to a Defense Department
statement, is that he “was actively developing plans to attack American
diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region.” If so — and
it hardly stretches credulity that he was — the strike was an act of
pre-emption. No U.S. president, of any party, should ever convey to an enemy
the impression it can plot attacks against Americans with impunity. To do
otherwise is to invite worse.
Trump’s problem is that, until
Thursday, that’s what he had done. For almost a year, an escalating series of
Iranian attacks on U.S. and allied assets were met by a conspicuous failure to
respond militarily. Trump also kept signaling his desire to withdraw U.S.
forces from the region.
The result was to embolden the Iranians
to hit harder. Instead of a calibrated cycle of escalation matched to a tacit
sense of limits, the Iranians reached until they overreached. On Wednesday,
Khamenei taunted Trump with the message that “there is no damn thing you can
do.” The supreme leader is now a publicly humiliated man. That is enormously
satisfying — and immensely dangerous. Rashness often springs from wounded
pride.
One possible outcome is that a spooked
Iranian leadership, already reeling from devastating sanctions and mass
demonstrations, will prefer to tread lightly, at least for the time being.
“Suleimani’s death could bring a sense of realism to the Islamic Republic’s
thinking,” says the Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad. For 40 years,
the regime has succeeded abroad because it’s been willing to play dirty games
against generally feckless opponents. It may now take its time to reassess that
view.
The alternative? Iran could mount a
global campaign of terrorist strikes, deploying foreign proxies like Hezbollah
for political deniability. It could try to take hostages at the American
Embassy in Baghdad, much as it did at the embassy in Tehran in 1979. It could
use its influence in Iraq to demand the expulsion of U.S. troops —
“accomplishing in the wake of his death what Suleimani long tried to accomplish
in life,” as Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies
observes. And it could accelerate its nuclear program, forcing Trump into a
major military confrontation he has been eager to avoid, especially in an
election year.
The next days will be decisive. The
best course for the United States is to spell out clearly to Iran what the
paths of escalation — and de-escalation — hold. On the de-escalatory side, a
return to the status quo ante and a willingness to explore negotiations over
the full range of Iran’s malign activities, including its regional aggression and
expanding nuclear program, in
exchange for the easing of oil and other economic sanctions. On the escalatory
side, a policy of deliberately disproportionate retaliation to any Iranian
aggression, no matter whether it’s carried out by Iran or its proxies, and no
matter whether it aims at us or our allies.
The
clearer we are in limning the courses of hope and fear, the likelier we are to
achieve a stable balance between them.
No comments:
Post a Comment