The Persian Wars

Screen capture from The Persian Wars, via Ancient History Lover/YouTube.

OK so that was a pretty exciting war that had us glued to the TV last night, but it clearly didn't change the basic outcome, that Iran had already won on 3 January, with the US killing of two Iranians, Qassem Soleimani and one other whose name I'm not finding, and five members of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces including deputy commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and his son-in-law Mohammed Reza al-Jaberi, the group's public relations officer: with that, the casualty list included

• Iran: 1 American dead and no Iraqis (per latest report)
• US: 2 Iranians dead, 27 Iraqis

Also

Iran informed Iraqi leadership about an attack on their country. The US did not inform them or Congress but several guess at Mar-a-lago were informed about it https://t.co/ONok5TkoZu

— President “I Caught the Swamp, I Caught Them All” (@realworldrj) January 8, 2020

It's attention to these details that makes Iran the winner.


In the contest over relations with Iraq, it's no contest as far as the Iraqi government goes: US has enraged them beyond words, Iran has treated them like a neighbor and a sovereign state and, importantly, not killed any. US has treated them as if they didn't exist at all, except for the hapless staffer in Baghdad who wrote up General Seely's notification to tell them we were moving our troops out of Iraq on their request and begging them not to freak out as the troops moved around (I'm convinced that was on instructions from Washington, as Trump tergiversated back and forth between plans to run away and plans to nuke Tehran), only to have it turned around later in the day,

As far as the Iraqi people are concerned, it's a similar turnaround: the public that has been demonstrating massively against Iranian interference for months, to the point of forcing the government to resign (the current government is under a caretaker prime minister while the parliament fails to agree on a new one; I'm still waiting for the ex-firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr bringing Shi'ites and Sunnis together in a massive movement for popular democracy but it's starting to feel like waiting for Jesse Jackson used to feel), and the Shi'ite community in particular has refocused its anger entirely on the US.

Meanwhile our European allies are really angry, partly for the same reasons (previous Trump outrages have been communicated to them in advance, but they were as blindsided by the Baghdad assassination as Baghdad was), and acting accordingly, per Matthew Karnitschig in the European Politico (h/t Jürgen):

Just how bad is it? Even as Iran’s supreme leader promised “severe” retaliation for the killing over the weekend, EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, invited Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif for a sitdown in Brussels. The U.S., which recently placed sanctions on Zarif, won’t even grant him a visa to visit the United Nations.

Angela Merkel, Europe’s de facto supreme leader, responded to the crisis by arranging a “working meeting” later this week — in Moscow.

Berlin appears to have concluded that sitting down with Vladimir Putin (who met with Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad this week to celebrate their success in crushing Syria’s civil war) would be more productive than a trip to Washington, on paper still Germany’s most important ally....

On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron, who tried in vain last year to bring Trump and the Iranian leadership together, spent about an hour on the phone with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Macron expressed his deep concern over the situation in the region and urged Iran “to refrain from taking any action that would aggravate rising tensions,” his office said in a statement.

And it seems the Germans in particular and European Union in general are both unwilling to give up on the Iran nuclear deal, though my immediate sourcing on that is pretty funky, and this is what all this diplomatic flurry is about: the Iranian restraint in this attack (some US commenters think not killing anybody was an Iranian failure, but it's pretty clear they did it on purpose, and it's the best part of the story) has given everybody renewed confidence in the Iranian regime's trustworthiness and positive intentions.

Trump, of course, had no war aims, so you can't say he lost exactly. He wanted to inflame his "base", and did that, and maybe help some friends make a small killing on the market, and presumably he wanted people to stop talking about Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader McConnell and the question of Trump's trial for high crimes and misdemeanors, and pretty much did that, at least for a few hours yesterday. But I expect the latter to be very short-term.

I may be back later if Trump says anything interesting. UPDATE: Nah.