Attention to the Unseen

Robert Malley, at International Crisis Group, writes: The U.S.-Iranian game has changed. Their rivalry for the most part played out as an attritional standoff: Washington laying siege to Iran’s economy in hopes that financial duress would lead either to its government’s capitulation to U.S. demands or to its ouster; and Tehran responding with actions that maintained a veneer of plausible deniability. Targeting Soleimani is liable to mark a shift from attrition toward open confrontation. In short, a U.S. president who…

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The New York Times reports: American oil workers were fleeing Iraq on Friday, as fears grew of war between the United States and Iran. At sermons in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, worshipers chanted, “Death to America!” And in Tahrir Square in central Baghdad, where antigovernment protesters have gathered for months, a banner went up with a pointed message to both Iran and the United States: “Keep your conflicts away from Iraq.” Iraqis awoke to the news on Friday…

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Kim Ghattas writes: [Soleimani] was instrumental in the violent crackdown against protests that had erupted in October. The protesters’ ire targeted not only the corruption and mismanagement of their own politicians, but Iran’s role in both, as well as its overbearing control over the country through proxy Shiite militias loyal to Tehran. “We in Iran know how to deal with protesters,” Soleimani had reportedly told Iraqi officials in October. “This happened in Iran and we got it under control.” Though…

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Ali Fathollah-Nejad writes: Soleimani was killed just as the ground on which the regional empire he created has begun to shake. The ongoing protests in Iraq and Lebanon have called for the sectarian and corrupt political classes in both countries to step down. In both Beirut and Baghdad, Tehran has been part of those political systems, and as such, complicit with their wrongdoings. Especially in Iraq, the Shia population has risen up against Iran’s outsized role and overt interference in…

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Elliot Cohen writes: Any war—and if you are in the business of blowing people up, you are at war—involves improvisation and reaction. As Winston Churchill somberly observed, “Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.” Iran cannot beat the United States in the field, but it can win the war politically, and may very well do so. The…

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The Washington Post reports: Officials reminded Trump that after the Iranians mined ships, downed the U.S. drone and allegedly attacked a Saudi oil facility, he had not responded. Acting now, they said, would send a message: “The argument is, if you don’t ever respond to them, they think they can get by with anything,” one White House official said. Trump was also motivated to act by what he felt was negative coverage after his 2019 decision to call off the…

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The New York Times reports: For a president who repeated his determination to withdraw from the caldron of the Middle East, the strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, who for two decades has led Iran’s most fearsome and ruthless military unit, the Quds Force, means there will be no escape from the region for the rest of his presidency, whether that is one year or five. Mr. Trump has committed the United States to a conflict whose dimensions are…

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Barbara Slavin writes: Few tears will be shed in many parts of the world for Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, whose Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps ruthlessly spread Iranian influence and contributed to the deaths of thousands of Syrians, Iraqis and Iranians, as well as hundreds of American servicemen in Iraq, over the past decade and a half. But revenge is not a strategy, and the killing of General Suleimani is a major — and incredibly risky —…

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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…

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The Guardian reports: Qassem Suleimani started his working life as a skinny, impoverished child construction labourer, and ended it as the most influential military commander in the Middle East. Through intellect, ruthlessness, courage and a dose of luck that finally ran out this week, he rose to become Iran’s second-most powerful man, official commander of Iran’s elite Quds forces and unofficial commander of a proliferation of proxy militias and allied politicians across the region. He was killed by US drone…

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