Saturday, January 4, 2020

For the Record: Soleimani

Tomb of the great 14th-century poet Hafez in the city of Shiraz, famous until the Islamic Revolution for its wine. Photo by Ondřej Žváček, via Wikipedia.

It may not look as if my plan for Trump not to start a war with Iran is working out so far. I'm not so sure what I want to say about it, but there are a bunch of kind of short-breathed ideas I can pass on.

The first thing I thought of that other people didn't seem to be thinking about was the market movement that followed the killing of Qassem Soleimani:


And then I was answering questions:


Clearly the only way to deal with someone with a total disregard for the laws of war is to blow him away with a surprise drone at the airport when he's waiting for his ride to the hotel.

And as I've been hearing a lot on the radio, forced to choose between the US and Iran, Iraq will always go with Iran, because they live next door and are never going to move out.

So all over Iraq, the demonstrators who have spent months protesting Iranian influence on the Baghdad government are now denouncing the US as well
BAGHDAD — 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.”
while the government debates throwing the Americans out altogether
Iraq's National Security Council suggested that Baghdad could ask the Washington to withdraw troops from the country on the heels of a U.S. airstrike in the capital Baghdad that killed a senior commander of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) and another from the Iraqi Hashd al-Shaabi group.
The council in a meeting on Friday chaired by Iraq's Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi discussed a U.S. airstrike that killed Qasem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC Quds Forces, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, vice head of Hashd al-Shaabi group, or Popular Mobilization Units (PMU).
Condemning the killing, the council declared that the attack violated the country's sovereignty.
It said the U.S. strike had transgressed the conditions for the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq, calling on the country's parliament to hold an emergency session on the matter to make a decision on whether to put an end to the U.S. military presence in the country.
Abdul-Mahdi also called on lawmakers to take legislative measures "to safeguard Iraq's dignity, security and sovereignty".
Kirsten Fontenrose at The Atlantic Council says this would be a great deal for Trump
The biggest favor the Iraqi Parliament can do for US President Donald J. Trump right now is to vote to evict the United States from Iraq. The US president has been clear on his preference for drawing down the US presence in the region rather than beefing it up. Right now, he is asking his advisers why the United States should stay in Iraq, where the two stated missions are to train the Iraqi Security Forces and conduct counterterrorism operations. 

But I think that's overreading the degree to which Trump has a policy intention as opposed to a campaign slogan. His actions over the past three years have shown him doubling the number of US troops in the region, moving them out of Russia's or Turkey's way on request but never actually moving them out, and mostly interested in "taking the oil" and bragging about being better than Obama. Successfully withdrawing troops from an unwinnable position in Syria might have looked better than Obama to a lot of people, but withdrawing troops from the theater of the war he just started with Iran looks like losing a war.

On New Year's Eve he threatened Iran with a swift and total defeat if they started a war, prior to starting one himself the next day:
Q    Mr. President, do you foresee going to war with Iran?
THE PRESIDENT:  I don’t think that would be a good idea for Iran.  It wouldn’t last very long.  Do I want to?  No.  I want to have peace.  I like peace.  And Iran should want peace more than anybody.  So I don’t see that happening.  No, I don’t think Iran would want that to happen.  It would go very quickly.
Iran wouldn't mind at all watching the Americans get thrown out by the Iraqi parliament. Speaking of swift and total,

Also, if Trump wants to defeat bad people, such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, he needs to stop doing everything he can to destroy their enemies:


Nothing urgent about the following sequence, but I thought it did a good job of laying out something that isn't well understood by everybody: when you've discovered that thing that George W. Bush didn't know in 2002 (that Sunni Muslims have beef with Shi'a Muslims), you haven't discovered the whole thing:



Tl;dr it's always more complicated than you thought. Unless it's something a Republican said, in which case it could be less complicated.
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