Sunday, January 5, 2020

West of Eden: The War is Over, You Read It Here First

Baghdad, Saturday, funeral procession for the Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, killed in the same bombing as the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, Photo by Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images via Axios.

Starting to feel a lot calmer about the prospects of a US-Iran was to be fought on Iraqi soil, or anyplace else, not least thanks to Donald's belligerent tweets on the subject, offering some new light on what he might think of the distinction between "warning" and "threat" but otherwise displaying pure impotence:


Sure, Jan. Who exactly has targeted how many sites over the New Year holiday, and how did they come up with that interestingly symbolic number?


I put it to you that it was not Donald, who can't know the number of Iran hostages in 1979 and wouldn't know how to look it up. In my view Stephen Miller is responsible for this sweet touch of kitsch, but that's not the important point. The important point is that the vital agencies that protect our national security, such as the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency and the NSC, had nothing to do with it.

This is Emperor Trump trying once again to make his government move by Twitter, or convince his followers that's what he's doing, and I'm not convinced he can.

Reporting yesterday by The New York Times showed how actual decisions get made and how Trump can in fact use the process to make for the worst possible option:
General Milley and Mr. Esper traveled on Sunday to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Palm Beach resort, a day after officials presented the president with an initial list of options for how to deal with escalating violence against American targets in Iraq.
The options included strikes on Iranian ships or missile facilities or against Iranian-backed militia groups in Iraq. The Pentagon also tacked on the choice of targeting General Suleimani, mainly to make other options seem reasonable.
Mr. Trump chose strikes against militia groups. On Sunday, the Pentagon announced that airstrikes approved by the president had struck three locations in Iraq and two in Syria controlled by the group, Kataib Hezbollah.
But after demonstrators moved on the US Baghdad embassy, Trump flew into a rage and, egged on by Pompeo and Pence, went back to the list:
When Mr. Trump chose the option of killing General Suleimani, top military officials, flabbergasted, were immediately alarmed about the prospect of Iranian retaliatory strikes on American troops in the region. It is unclear if General Milley or Mr. Esper pushed back on the president’s decision.
Even though the official justification for attacking Soleimani, that he was in Baghdad finalizing plans for an attack on US interests, wasn't really supported by the facts:
some officials voiced private skepticism about the rationale for a strike on General Suleimani, who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American troops over the years. According to one United States official, the new intelligence indicated “a normal Monday in the Middle East” — Dec. 30 — and General Suleimani’s travels amounted to “business as usual.”
That official described the intelligence as thin and said that General Suleimani’s attack was not imminent because of communications the United States had between Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and General Suleimani showing that the ayatollah had not yet approved any plans by the general for an attack.
Which means that the attack certainly violated international law as characterized on NPR before these details came out:
Agnes Callamard, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, questions whether this strike would meet the standard needed to justify its legality on those grounds. "The test for so-called anticipatory self-defense is very narrow: It must be a necessity that is 'instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation'. This test is unlikely to be met in these particular cases," she tweeted.
"I hope the U.S. has rock-solid, written evidence of a continuing or an ongoing or a planned attack on the United States or its interests," says Solis. "You've got to have more than an assertion that plans were underway."
Another complicated legal aspect of this attack is the fact that it occurred within Iraq.
"Generally speaking, international law says that states are not supposed to use military force on each other's territories without the consent of the host state," Anderson notes...
Professor Cole predicted Friday that Iranian authorities would work to prevent the eruption of a real war, and focus on making the US position in Iraq really uncomfortable, taking advantage of the fact (hardly reported as more than a trivial detail in most of the US press coverage) that Soleimani isn't the only important person murdered in the strike:
Iran’s leadership is too shrewd to rush to the battlements at this moment, and will be prepared to play the long game. My guess is that they will encourage their allies among Iraqi Shiites to get up a massive protest at the US embassy and at bases housing US troops.
They will be aided in this task of mobilizing Iraqis by the simultaneous US assassination of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy head of the Popular Mobilization Forces. Al-Muhandis is a senior military figure in the Iraqi armed forces, not just a civilian militia figure. Moreover, the Kata’ib Hizbullah that he headed is part of a strong political bloc, al-Fath, which has 48 members in parliament and forms a key coalition partner for the current, caretaker prime minister, Adil Abdulmahdi. Parliament won’t easily be able to let this outrage pass.
Sure enough, this morning the Iraqi parliament voted to expel US troops from the country, and the anti-ISIS coalition has felt obliged to suspend operations, as The Guardian reports:
The international coalition fighting Islamic State has suspended operations against the terrorist group so its forces can concentrate on protecting US, UK and other troops at bases in Iraq following of the killing of Qassem Suleimani.
The announcement came minutes before the Iraqi parliament passed a motion calling for the expulsion of US troops, in the aftermath of the assassination by the US of the Iranian general and the leader of Iraq’s Hezbollah militia outside Baghdad airport on Friday.
Pompeo posted video showing people "dancing in the streets" of Baghdad on Thursday to celebrate Soleimani's death, though he doesn't seem to mean the same thing by "dancing" as the rest of us,

but the reality by Friday looked very different as the mourning demonstration in tribute to General Soleimani got going,

Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images via Axios.
more or less instantly showing Pompeo's propaganda effort to be even more pathetic than it was dishonest.

It's possible that many more people are going to get hurt in the tit-for-tat retaliation schedule before this is over, and likely that the Pentagon will find some way or keeping troops in Iraq and continuing to help in the fight against Iran's ISIS enemies, though they may have to humiliate themselves in some way to do so, but in principle, a little sooner than I was predicting, Iran has already won the war.

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