Attention to the Unseen

Politico reports: For years, they urged America to take a harder line on Iran, dissed its decision to ink a nuclear deal with Tehran and cheered when a tough-talking Donald Trump won the presidency. Now, America’s closest Middle East allies are practically ducking for cover. In recent days, as the U.S. killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and Iran fired back with a missile barrage in Iraq, Gulf Arab states and Israel were expressing second thoughts about what they’d helped unleash….

Read More Read More

Kareem Shaheen writes: The voice on the other end of the line sounded like nothing I had heard before. There was a gasping, exhausted weakness to it, as though the young man whose voice it was had put every ounce of energy he had left into articulating the words. It was the voice of somebody who was being starved to death. The young man was a resident of Madaya, a town of about 40,000 people near the Syrian-Lebanese border. It…

Read More Read More

Politico reports: In recent days, one aide to President Donald Trump has blitzed the media to talk about troop deployments, deterrence and the likelihood of American bombs raining down on Iranian soil. It’s not the man who leads the Pentagon. Instead, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has seized the spotlight amid the escalating U.S. confrontation with Iran. As he’s done so, he’s come across to some observers as an unofficial secretary of defense, overshadowing the actual defense secretary. Pompeo’s omnipresence…

Read More Read More

NBC News reports: Lawmakers came away with vastly different interpretations of two classified briefings that top Trump administration officials held Wednesday about the airstrike last week that killed top Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, with two Republican senators sharply criticizing the officials. “It was probably the worst briefing I’ve seen at least on a military issue in the nine years I’ve served in the United States Senate,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said. Lee said he left the briefing “somewhat unsatisfied” with…

Read More Read More

Politico reports: Capitol Hill breathed a sigh of relief Wednesday as President Donald Trump pulled the nation back from the brink of all-out war with Iran — with even some of the GOP’s staunchest defense hawks applauding Trump’s restrained response to the Iranian counter-attack. “A homerun speech by President Trump about the challenges we face with Iran. It was measured and firm,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of Trump’s top allies in Congress. On the other end of the…

Read More Read More

Jamelle Bouie writes: Much of the work of H.P. Lovecraft, an American horror and science fiction writer who worked during the first decades of the 20th century, is defined by individual encounters with the incomprehensible, with sights, sounds and ideas that undermine and disturb reality as his characters understand it. Faced with things too monstrous to be real, but which exist nonetheless, Lovecraftian protagonists either reject their senses or descend into madness, unable to live with what they’ve learned. It…

Read More Read More

CNN reports: There is a growing belief among some Trump administration officials that Iran’s missiles intentionally missed areas populated by Americans when they targeted two Iraqi bases housing US troops early Wednesday local time, multiple administration officials said. Iran fired a number of missiles aimed at the bases in retaliation for the American strike that killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani last week, further escalating tensions between the two countries. Officials have said there were no US casualties as a result…

Read More Read More

The Washington Post reports: The Iranian missile strike on American locations in Iraq on Tuesday was a calibrated event intended to cause minimal American casualties, give the Iranians a face-saving measure and provide an opportunity for both sides to step back from the brink of war, according to senior U.S. officials in Washington and the Middle East. White House officials were bracing as early as Tuesday morning for Iran to respond to the U.S. killing last week of Qasem Soleimani,…

Read More Read More

Al-Jumhuriya reports: In 2011, Soleimani was promoted to the rank of Major General. It was no accident that this came at the height of the Arab Spring, which the Iranian regime saw as an existential battle to preserve its regional power. The strategy conceived by Tehran to confront the threat of democratic revolution had Syria at its very center. Following the outbreak of Syria’s uprising in the spring of 2011, Iran swiftly determined to stand by Bashar al-Assad and secure…

Read More Read More

John Bellinger writes: On Sunday, President Trump — as he is wont to do when criticized — doubled down on his threat to bomb Iranian cultural sites if Iran attacks the United States in response to the killing of Qassim Suleimani. Although the United States is not a party to the Rome Statue, which makes intentional attacks on historic monuments a war crime, the United States is a party to the 1954 Hague Convention on Protection of Cultural Property in…

Read More Read More

Murtaza Hussain writes: In the four decaes since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, few Iranian leaders have achieved the global profile attained by Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the military commander killed in an American airstrike on Thursday. After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Suleimani emerged as the United States’s most capable adversary in that country. His American counterpart at a key point during the occupation, Gen. David Petraeus, described Suleimani as “a truly evil figure” in a letter to Robert Gates,…

Read More Read More

Bloomberg reports: As the U.S. awaits possible retribution over a recent airstrike that killed a top general, there’s at least one American businessman who can attest, in detail, to what happened after he provoked Iran. In October 2013, Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate and prominent supporter of conservative politicians and Israel, appeared on a panel in New York in which he suggested that the U.S. could send a message to Iran, regarding its nuclear ambitions, by detonating an American warhead…

Read More Read More

Robin Wright writes: The flag-draped coffin of General Qassem Suleimani was thronged by wailing mobs in Tehran on Monday, as the fallout from his death, in a U.S. air strike, accelerated with breathtaking speed. Iran has not seen such an outpouring of emotion on the streets since the death of the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1989. His successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wept openly—as did other political leaders and military officers—as he prayed over the casket. Esmail Gha’ani, Suleimani’s…

Read More Read More

Azadeh Moaveni writes: The last time I wrote seriously about a war with Iran was in 2012. It had been an especially fraught year, with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards running naval exercises in the Persian Gulf, Israel and the United States conducting joint drills, and the safety of oil shipping lanes looking entirely unassured. Oil prices rattled skittishly, everyone suddenly monitored ships, and headlines speculated that Israel might attack Iran’s nuclear sites. My assignment was to consider “the day after” —…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: The consequences of the American assassination of a top Iranian general rippled across the Middle East and beyond on Sunday, with Iran ending commitments it made to limit its nuclear fuel production and Iraqi lawmakers voting to expel American forces from their country. Steeling for retaliation from Iran, an American-led coalition in Iraq and Syria suspended the campaign it has waged against the Islamic State for years, and hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to…

Read More Read More