The killing of Iranian Quds force commander Qassim Sulaymani and Iraqi militia chief Abu Mehdi al-Muhandis were an important tactical victory, but the critical question is whether the Trump administration can parlay it into a wider strategic victory and avoid it becoming a strategic defeat.
It’s important to start by acknowledging that the killings of Sulaymani and Muhandis were both justified and beneficial to the United States. Both had directed operations that resulted in the deaths of many Americans —soldiers and civilians — and many Iraqi civilians as well. Moreover, these were two of the most competent adversaries the United States and its allies faced in the Middle East. Sulaymani was the single most important reason that Tehran had repeatedly bested Washington across the region over the past 20 years despite having poorer tools with which to do it. He played a weaker hand brilliantly. And Muhandis was his most loyal and probably most capable Iraqi agent. Eliminating them was justice for many victims and a boon to American interests across the Middle East.
At the strategic level, however, the picture is both more complex and less rosy.
Although we may never get the full story of the Trump administration’s decision-making, the evidence and accounts released so far suggest it was a decision made quickly, driven by the President’s anger at the death of an American contractor by Iraqi Shi’a militiamen coupled with intelligence that indicated that Sulaymani and his minions were planning more such attacks and that the pair would be in the perfect circumstances for a drone strike. What is important about this is that it indicates that it was a decision without the framework of a wider strategy. That’s why so much of the impact of the strike runs contrary to what Trump has been trying to do in the Middle East. And that’s where the strategic problems lie.
President Trump has made it abundantly clear that his approach to Iran is to employ “maximum pressure” through economic sanctions to try to force the Iranians to negotiate a new nuclear deal, one better than the deal President Obama got. This was always a long shot since Trump’s very decision to abandon that deal emasculated Tehran’s pragmatists and empowered its hardliners who had zero interest in negotiating with him, let alone agreeing to deeper concessions than those made to Obama. However, the Sulaymani killing has put the final nail in that coffin. Iran announced Sunday that it was withdrawing from the nuclear pact altogether. No one should hold his or her breath waiting for Tehran to agree to a new, more constraining nuclear deal — certainly not with Donald Trump.
Second, President Trump seemed to want to retain US troops in Iraq, having chastised Obama for his decision to withdraw them in 2011 and having boasted that the American presence there was an important check on Iran. However, the Sulaymani and Muhandis killings have put that in jeopardy as well. The Iraqi parliament voted on Sunday to evict the American troops and while the Iraqi government doesn’t always listen to its parliament, in these circumstances it will be hard to resist.
Losing the US military presence would be strategically disastrous not only because Iraq is important in its own right, but also because it is critical to the administration’s maximum pressure policy toward Iran. Iran uses the Iraqi economy to withstand American sanctions through smuggling, currency manipulation, and other forms of graft. If US forces are sent packing, Iraq is likely to head toward greater Iranian domination or entropy, or both. And both would be terrible for the United States and our allies in the region. Moreover, it would be a tragic irony if the death of Sulaymani and Muhandis led to greater Iranian control of Iraq.
Iraq was the obvious place for the administration to have tried to capitalize on the killings. Many of Iran’s allies and proxies in Iraq are running scared for the moment. If the United States was willing to kill Sulaymani and Muhandis, whose deaths ran huge risks, how much more willing might Trump be to kill them who are not nearly as important? In these circumstances, Washington could have stepped in quickly after the strike with a set of requests and incentives for Iraqi officials to take actions designed to help Baghdad resolve its political deadlock, satisfy its angry protesters, and start a new process that could produce a more workable political system — all of which was being blocked by Iran and its allies at the direction of Sulaymani and Muhandis. Unfortunately, the administration seems to have had no plans to do so. The US ambassador was not even in the country at the time.
Finally, as many others have noted, the killings risk a bigger conflict with Iran, something else President Trump has insisted he wants to avoid. In the president’s own head, the killings might be somehow meant to avert a war, but they are overwhelmingly seen as the exact opposite in Iran and across the region. Still, Ayatollah Khamene’i of Iran is a very cautious old man with tremendous respect for American military power. He might choose not to respond at all, as my friend Ray Takeyh has cogently argued elsewhere in Politico. But emotional events like this can run roughshod over cold rationality. Remember how the United States reacted to 9/11? I think it fair to say that, in retrospect, not every action we took in response proved smart or beneficial.
Moreover, the Iranians have said they would respond at a time and place of their own choosing, meaning in a way that will play to their strengths and America’s vulnerabilities. How President Trump responds to such an Iranian riposte will likely prove critical in determining any escalation to a wider war. Given that his response to the death of a single American was to assassinate (arguably) the second most powerful man in Iran, his reaction to an Iranian move that killed dozens or even hundreds of Americans could be even more provocative.
It is going to be hard for the Trump administration to cope with the damage to its own regional strategies, even if others (including this author) believed them to be mistakes all along. The question then becomes, faced with the undermining of his own policies toward the Middle East what does President Trump do? Does he stoop and build ‘em up (again) with worn-out tools or does he decide ‘to hell with the whole region’ and pull back altogether? In these ways, the Sulaymani and Muhandis killings could soon present Trump with a stark choice between getting far more involved in the Middle East to support our allies and hold back the Iranians or getting out altogether. Unfortunately, doing either right would require a skill and subtlety that he has yet to demonstrate.
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