Robin Wright writes:

On Friday, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared three days of public mourning and warned that “harsh vengeance awaits those criminals behind martyrdom of General Suleimani.” He moved quickly to name Brigadier General Esmail Gha’ani, who had worked closely with Suleimani, as the new Quds Force commander. Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s U.S.-educated Foreign Minister, who spent two years negotiating the 2015 nuclear deal with the United States, called the American air strike an act of international terrorism. “The US bears responsibility for all consequences of its rogue adventurism,” he tweeted. Iran’s state-controlled television characterized the assassination as the U.S.’s “biggest miscalculation” since the Second World War. “The people of the region will no longer allow Americans to stay,” it said.

Iran’s revolutionary regime often makes boastful threats, but the murder of Suleimani alarmed veteran U.S. military and diplomatic officials who have served in the Middle East. “It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of this,” the retired general David Petraeus, who led U.S. forces in Iraq and later served as the director of the C.I.A., told me. Suleimani was Petraeus’s nemesis during the eight-year U.S. war in Iraq. “Iran has to be in shock right now. Its version of the National Security Council will be on overdrive,” he said. “But there’s a whole universe of possibilities now, everything from proxy retaliation, kidnappings of American citizens, actions against coalition partners, even an attempt to do something in the U.S. We certainly have large force concentrations in the region, too.”

Was the U.S. attack an act of war? Douglas Silliman, who was the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq until last winter and is now the president of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, told me that the death of Suleimani was the equivalent of Iran killing the commander of U.S. military operations in the Middle East and South Asia. “If Iran had killed the commander of U.S. Central Command, what would we consider it to be?” he said. John Limbert, one of fifty-two Americans who were taken hostage in Iran in 1979, told me that he was happy Suleimani was gone, but quickly added, “This is not going to end well.” [Continue reading…]