Page 54 - BNE_magazine_02_2020

54 Opinion
bne February 2020
Assassination of Soleimani: What if Iran’s real plan of revenge is to turf Trump out of office?
Will Conroy in Prague
To those surprised that Iran chose to respond to the US assassination of its second most powerful official with modest attacks on two Iraq air bases used by the Americans – so carefully calibrated that they turned out to be casualty-free – there is a big question that should chip away: What if Tehran’s calculation is that the best revenge for the death of Qasem Soleimani would be to use bloody proxy attacks and other tactics in the Middle East in the months running up to Donald Trump’s re-election bid in November to tie the US president in knots and help ensure he is kicked out of the Oval Office?
Provoking a full-on confrontation with a superpower fairly bristling with state of the art weaponry is almost certainly not in Tehran’s interests – not that it would necessarily be
a cakewalk for the American military – but doing all it can to ensure Trump doesn’t get a second term as president absolutely is. Indeed, if Trump is returned to the White House by US voters, and stays embroiled in his bitter standoff with the Iranians, a war between America and Iran might soon become an inevitability if the commander-in-chief feels sufficiently off the leash.
Two well-known Iran analysts were among observers taking up these themes on January 8, a day that ended with what might have been another tactical attack by Iran – Reuters was reporting that at least one of two Katyusha rockets fired into Baghdad’s Green Zone fell just 100 metres away from the US embassy.
Sanam Vakil, an Iran specialist at Chatham House, told The Independent: “They [Iran] are trying to regularly message the various constituencies and political groups in the United States for their own purposes.
Soleimani last year received Iran's highest military honour, the Order of Zolfaghar, from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
“They’re messaging not just to the current administration but obviously to the Democratic candidates. They’re trying to assess US politics as they plan their next steps and look at the year.”
Mahdi Khalil, a political analyst in Tehran, remarked: “There’s a perception in Iran that the Democrats and perhaps other western countries are working to make sure Trump is not re-elected. If he’s re-elected there will definitely be a war.”
Assassination of military leader of a sovereign nation
Iran showed great restraint in limiting its initial retaliatory move to the conservative missile strikes on the military bases. But Trump, after all, has assassinated the military leader of
a sovereign nation on the soil of another sovereign nation (and there was no consultation over the move with the Iraqis). The Iranians almost certainly have more in store. Whatever the truth is about the level of involvement Soleimani had with “terrorists” and pro-Iran militia that took the lives of hundreds of US soldiers in Iraq as he masterminded Iran’s diplomatic and military moves in Middle East conflict zones – and nobody seriously claims that he didn’t get blood on his hands amid the labyrinthine and clandestine world of hostilities in the region – Trump went beyond the pale in casually taking him out with a remote-control Reaper drone attack at an airport, ordered from his holiday residence in Florida.
Portraits of Soleimani are being carried aloft in rallies from Tehran to Gaza to Yemen. The charismatic major-general,
62 when he died, who rose from his origins as a farm boy has become a “living martyr” and icon of the Shi’ite anti-American resistance. Adding to the keenly felt indignance is that his big role in halting the rampage of the Islamic State terror across Iraq and Syria, sometimes even co-ordinating with the US, is rarely acknowledged in the West.
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