To keep his promise to kill an achievement of Obama’s, Trump has been willing to break his promise to get us out of wars in the Middle East.
In a november night in 2013, Barack Obama delivered a statement about an interim nuclear deal that had just been reached, freezing Iran’s program in place. When he was done, I walked with him back to the entrance of his residence, watched by the stoic portraits of former presidents. “Congratulations,” I said. “You just made sure that we won’t have a war with Iran during your presidency.”
“That’s probably true,” he said, considering the question. “But I want to make sure that the next president doesn’t have to go to war either.”
Obama was referring to the need to reach a comprehensive deal that rolled back Iran’s nuclear program. It would take almost two years of painstaking negotiations to get there, but the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) accomplished that objective. Under the terms of the JCPOA, Iran destroyed the core of a reactor that could have produced plutonium for a bomb; removed two-thirds of its centrifuges, the machines that can enrich uranium for a bomb; shipped 98 percent of its stockpile of enriched uranium (enough for 10 bombs) out of the country; and submitted to the most comprehensive international inspections regime ever put into place to monitor a nuclear program.
These achievements are worth revisiting, because any hope of saving the Iran deal likely died with the killing of Qassem Soleimani. Indeed, it’s no surprise that the Iranian government has indicated that it will no longer abide by the limits on its nuclear program imposed by the JCPOA. How did we get here? The debate over the Iran deal was among the most acrimonious of the Obama years. Throughout 2015, congressional Republicans stridently opposed it. Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia worked to marshal opposition. Think tanks churned out alarmist reports about the JCPOA. Tens of millions of dollars were spent by outside groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and United Against Nuclear Iran urging Congress to kill the deal. To prevent that legislation from passing, we worked frenetically to muster 41 Democratic Senate votes to uphold a filibuster. Indeed, the fact that it was far easier for George W. Bush to take the United States into an unnecessary war in Iraq than it was for Barack Obama to secure a nuclear deal to avoid one with Iran says something deeply strange and alarming about our country and its politics.
As soon as he began his run for the presidency, Donald Trump anointed himself the most strident of the JCPOA’s opponents, calling it “the worst deal ever negotiated.” It is likely, of course, that Trump couldn’t even describe the Iran deal’s terms. He failed to articulate a different set of nuclear restrictions, or to offer his views on the nature of centrifuges that Iran should be allowed to operate, or the research and development it should be permitted to perform. Trump simply wanted to destroy anything that Obama built and to satiate right-wing supporters who had their own reasons for opposing the JCPOA. What Trump could do is lie about the Iran deal, and he did so relentlessly.
Upon becoming president, Trump encountered an inconvenient truth: The Iran deal was working. Trump’s own intelligence community and military leadership confirmed that Iran was complying with the JCPOA’s terms; his own secretary of defense argued publicly that staying in the JCPOA was in America’s interest; and all the other parties to the deal—the European Union, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China—opposed Trump’s instinct to pull out. After Trump refused to certify that Iran was complying with the JCPOA (even though it was), even Republicans in Congress quietly refused to reimpose sanctions. And after Trump demanded a better deal, French President Emmanuel Macron offered him the opportunity to pursue one through negotiation, provided that the JCPOA stayed in place. Despite all this evidence and all these efforts, Trump withdrew from the Iran deal in May of 2018 and started reimposing sanctions.
Few recent presidential decisions have been proved to be so spectacularly wrong in such a short period of time.
Trump said that in withdrawing from the JCPOA, he would be in a stronger position to stop Iran’s provocations across the Middle East. The opposite has proved to be the case. Iran has already resumed aspects of its nuclear program that were restricted under the JCPOA. And over the past year alone, Iran or its proxies have shot down a U.S. drone, harassed and seized oil tankers, bombed Saudi oil infrastructure, killed unarmed protesters, and resumed rocket attacks against U.S. interests in Iraq. During the implementation of the Iran deal, by contrast, there wasn’t a single such rocket attack from a Shia militia. Trump initiated the escalatory cycle that led us to this extraordinarily dangerous moment. It is ironic that the killing of Qassem Soleimani could put the final nail in the coffin of the Iran deal. In the Obama White House, we assessed that Soleimani opposed the JCPOA, and that he led a hard-line flank that viewed the Iranian foreign minister who conducted the negotiations with suspicion. This view was often mocked by Iran-deal opponents, who declared that there was no distinction between hard-liners and more moderate Iranian officials. Indeed, U.S. hawks regularly foreclose opportunities for diplomacy by wrongly seeing the government of any adversary as a monolith. But now, in the wake of Soleimani’s assassination, that debate is largely moot: As mourners flood the streets, all of Iran’s leaders are consolidating around a harder line, vowing to chase the United States out of the region.
We have already seen the consequences of this latest escalation in Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign come into focus. Iraqi leaders are demanding that we leave their country, after Americans sacrificed thousands of lives and spent more than $1 trillion there; new restrictions are inhibiting the fight against ISIS; Iran is casting off the remaining limits on its nuclear program. In the months and years to come, we should expect renewed attacks against U.S. interests—and Americans—from Iran and its proxies. In contrast to the international unity that enabled the achievement of the JCPOA, Trump’s abandonment of it has alienated the United States from our closest allies. And in his other signature foreign-policy initiative—negotiations with North Korea—Kim Jong Un is pushing forward with his own nuclear and missile programs, perhaps having drawn the lesson that you cannot trust the United States to keep a nuclear deal.
In response, Trump and his chief lieutenant on Iran—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—have sought to deflect blame to the JCPOA. While blaming the Iran deal for the consequences of Trump pulling out of the Iran deal is absurd, this argument should come as no surprise. Trump’s Iran policy was formulated in opposition to Obama, not with an eye toward actual governing. His is a worldview that relies on false charges, hyperbolic rhetoric, and assertions of strength as an end in itself, and not as a means to achieving something. At a Cabinet meeting last year, Trump sat at the table with a Game of Thrones–style poster that read “Sanctions are coming,” as if it were all just a movie, and not real life.
By contrast, the Iran deal was designed to address reality, and discharge the responsibilities of governing. Like any such effort, it was imperfect, and left all parties dissatisfied. For the Iranians, it was flawed because it didn’t lift all sanctions; it did, however, offer relief from certain sanctions and the prospect of further relief if Iran continued to comply. For us, it was flawed because the JCPOA’s most effective restrictions on the Iranian nuclear program expired in 10 or 15 years—but that was 10 or 15 more years of assurance than having no deal in place, and further negotiations that built upon the JCPOA were always an available option. Finally, the JCPOA didn’t stop Iran’s ballistic-missile program or its support for terror in the Middle East; however, the JCPOA did ensure that a regime that has ballistic missiles and supports terror was verifiably prohibited from obtaining a nuclear weapon. That was the whole point. You don’t make nuclear deals like that with your friends. Indeed, imagine how the current crisis would feel if Iran already had nuclear weapons.
Governing isn’t about making demands on other countries that will never be achieved just because they sound good back in Washington. And the presidency certainly isn’t a movie. When “sanctions are coming,” real people get hurt and terrible things can happen in the real world. One legacy of the JCPOA is that it demonstrates the utility of a different approach.
As Trump confronts the consequences of a crisis of his own creation, he can thank Obama for the fact that Iran doesn’t yet have the means to produce a nuclear weapon. He can thank Obama for the fact that Iran’s nuclear program is set back from where it was in 2015. He can thank Obama for the inspections regime that has functioned effectively. By contrast, the result of Trump’s policy—designed for Fox News sets and campaign rallies—has been a more hard-line Iranian politics, an Iranian adversary that has stepped up its provocations, and a newly unconstrained Iranian nuclear program.
Barack Obama did achieve a deal good enough to prevent his successor from having to go to war with Iran. But now, despite all that work, a de facto state of war exists between the United States and Iran. To keep his promise to kill an achievement of Obama’s, Donald Trump has been willing to break his promise to get us out of wars in the Middle East. In doing so, he has tragically proved Obama right: The choice all along was between the Iran deal or an unconstrained Iranian nuclear program and some form of war.
The Dangers Posed by the Killing of Qassem Suleimani
The killing of Qassem Suleimani, the Iranian commander targeted by an American strike Thursday night, is the most consequential act taken against the regime in Tehran in thirty years—even if we don’t know what those consequences will be. One thing is clear: we’re entering a dangerous period, in which the conflict between the two countries could easily spin out of control.
Suleimani’s biography as a pivotal figure in Iran and the region is well known. Since the late nineteen-nineties, he was engaged in trying to remake the Middle East to Iran’s advantage, directing his proxies to kill or dispatch anyone who impeded his vision of an Iranian-dominated sphere of influence stretching from Tehran to the Mediterranean Sea. He was remarkably successful, legendary even—certainly the most influential operative in the region in modern times. He was involved in sponsoring terrorist attacks, propping up despots like Bashar al-Assad in Syria, helping to assassinate at least one foreign leader—the Prime Minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri—and killing hundreds of American soldiers along the way. In the latter years of the American war in Iraq, Suleimani’s militias deployed a particularly bloody weapon against U.S. soldiers—the “explosively formed penetrator,” or E.F.P.—which tore through the armor of U.S. military vehicles and wreaked havoc on soldiers and marines. It was no small irony that he died on the road to the Baghdad International Airport, where so many Americans soldiers and Iraqis died by ambush.
Suleimani’s death is a heavy blow to the Iranian regime. He was not just the central figure in the country’s foreign policy and military; he was also considered a pillar of the Revolution itself. Since 1979, Iran has regarded its defense against foreign enemies, particularly the United States, as central to its survival. Suleimani’s vision of the region was formed in the nineteen-eighties, during the Iran-Iraq War, which left more than a million people dead and for which the Iranians, not entirely without reason, blamed the U.S. and its allies. Suleimani, a veteran of that war, vowed that nothing like it would happen to Iran again, and he built the Quds Force—a wing of the Revolutionary Guard—into a small, mobile army capable of waging asymmetric warfare against the country’s enemies, including the United States. When I asked Ryan Crocker, a veteran American diplomat, what motivated Suleimani, he said that it was love of country—and also something more visceral: “Nationalism drives him, and the love of the fight.”
U.S. officials from previous Administrations have said that Suleimani did not live as a well-guarded recluse like Osama bin Laden, in Pakistan, and the military could have killed him; but the U.S. decided that it was not worth provoking a large-scale retaliation. “Suleimani was lucky,’’ Meir Dagan, the former head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, once told me. “It’s important to be lucky.” (Dagan died in 2016.)
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Read Dexter Filkins’s 2013 Profile of Qassem Suleimani.
Suleimani has been replaced by his longtime deputy, but it’s not clear that any commander in Iran is his equal in guile or status. He was as skilled in diplomacy as he was on the battlefield, and as comfortable with diplomats as he was with front-line soldiers, whom he adored. And he had an especially close relationship with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader. “A guy like Suleimani—they don’t have any more like him,’’ John Maguire, a twenty-three-year veteran of the C.I.A. specializing in the Middle East, told me. Maguire is one of the few Americans ever to come to face to face with Suleimani. They met in Baghdad, in 2004, when Iraqi politicians were trying to broker a rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran. “He had a command presence,” Maguire said. “He walked into the room and you could feel him.”
In Iraq, Suleimani had four deputies, who helped oversee the Shiite militias who have, most recently, been leading demonstrations against the American Embassy. The leader of one of those militias, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, of Kata’ib Hezbollah, died in the same strike as Suleimani. Muhandis has a long record of attacking Americans, too, beginning with the bombing of the American and French Embassies in Kuwait, in 1983. Kata’ib Hezbollah—an organization backed, trained, armed, and directed by Suleimani—is responsible for the deaths of scores of American soldiers in Iraq. Ever since the Trump Administration walked away from the nuclear deal signed under the Obama Administration, the U.S. and Iran have engaged in a series of provocative acts. By killing Suleimani, the Trump Administration has risked a wider, more unpredictable conflict, which could flare in many places and in many ways. It’s hard to imagine that the Iranian regime won’t respond to the American strike—it will feel that it has to. But where, and how? Maguire told me that the Quds Force has long specialized in two tactics: hostage-taking and truck-bombing. But the Americans are so well fortified in Iraq (and across the Middle East), and the American military presence in Iraq is so robust, that it’s more possible that the Iranians, if they decide to retaliate, will do so elsewhere. “It’s a better bet that they will choose another place—somewhere where the Americans are not as well protected,’’ he said. Maguire told me that he is not convinced that the Iranians will respond right away, or even at all, because of the deep sense of shock of losing Suleimani. “It’s a body blow to the regime,’’ he said. The biggest danger, of course, is that the Iranians respond, and possibly miscalculate, and then the United States does the same. That’s how wars start.
President Trump said on Friday, as he has previously, that the U.S. is not seeking war or regime change in Iran. Yet, since taking office, the Trump Administration has made regime change its implicit policy. By pulling out of the Iranian nuclear accord and imposing crippling sanctions on the country, Trump’s advisers have wagered that they can bring the regime down. By killing Suleimani, the Administration has taken the fight directly to its leadership.
American Foreign Policy Is Broken. Suleimani’s Killing Proves It.
A properly functioning National Security Council would never have let it happen, for good reason.
The targeted killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani and four others in a precision strike by an MQ-9 Reaper drone at Baghdad International Airport was an impressive display of American military prowess. And it liquidated a destabilizing figure: The general was the commander of the Quds Force, which is responsible for Iran’s covert and extraterritorial military operations. In the scheme of things, he had it coming. Yet killing him made little strategic sense for the United States. In some ways, the most significant thing about his death is what it shows about the breakdown of American foreign policymaking.
President Trump ordered the strike directly, prompted by the death of an American contractor on Dec. 27 in a rocket attack by Kataib Hezbollah, an Iranian-sponsored Iraqi Shia militia. Mr. Trump did not bother to consult congressional leaders. As with his other displays of martial fiat, his immediate impulse was probably to shock the liberal domestic audience, vicariously make himself feel tough, and assert raw executive power by going around the normal channels of decision making.
Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama had considered taking out General Suleimani but rejected it — not for lack of nerve, but for fear of undue escalation and an unnecessary war with Iran. The fundamental facts on the ground have not changed, and in the kind of robust interagency, national security decision-making process that the National Security Council staff is supposed to supervise, such concerns would have been systematically raised, dissected and discussed, and a consensus reached to inform presidential action. No such process seems to have occurred here.
The Pentagon has claimed, facilely, that General Suleimani was hit because the Revolutionary Guard was planning attacks on American targets in the region. But in a proper interagency review, the intelligence community could have pointed out that “decapitation” is a patently unreliable means of pre-emption — particularly when the organization in question is the Revolutionary Guard, an integral part of a well-honed security state with considerable depth of command talent.
In addition, the State Department might have noted that next to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, General Suleimani was arguably the country’s most powerful and venerated figure, and that when the target was such a senior and esteemed official, his countrymen were likely to perceive his killing as outright assassination. The State Department would also have emphasized that assassination was a flagrant casus belli, or provocation for war.
Had the Justice Department argued that targeted killing is distinct from assassination, which has long been proscribed by executive order, a raft of other government agencies might have noted that perceptions matter, perhaps anticipating Mr. Khamenei’s response to the deadly strike: “His departure to God does not end his path or his mission, but a forceful revenge awaits the criminals who have his blood and the blood of the other martyrs last night on their hands.”
The National Security Council would have undoubtedly asked the intelligence community for a detailed assessment of Iran’s possible responses to the strike. Analysts would have underscored the inevitability of lethal attacks on Americans and American interests: terrorist attacks on embassies or other civilian or military facilities in the Middle East and farther afield, military escalation on the ground in Syria or Iraq, cyberattacks, the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, Hezbollah attacks on Israel, further operations targeting Gulf States’ oil infrastructure, and accelerating movement toward nuclear breakout.
Drilling deeper, intelligence analysts could have stressed the possibility that the strike on General Suleimani might encourage a new strain of transnational terrorism. While acknowledging that the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in the Middle East, has largely resisted venturing outside the Middle East for the past 25 years, they would have stressed that it is considered the most capable nonstate armed group in the world, the A Team to Al Qaeda’s B Team — a force that was shaped and nurtured by General Suleimani himself.
What’s more, such an official would have warned, Hezbollah has fiercely demonstrated its willingness to prosecute Iranian interests, against Israel and in Syria. If Iran so asked, the assessment might have continued, Hezbollah would turn outward, as it did in 1992, when it bombed the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and killed 29, and in 1994, when it bombed a Jewish community center there and killed 85.
An appropriately functioning National Security Council would have asked: How does this fit in the administration’s overall foreign policy?
The State Department would have underlined that a chief objective of the administration’s Iran policy, including its withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, was to roll back Iran’s nefarious regional activities — in particular, intervention in the Syrian civil war, political intrigue in Iraq and support for the Houthis in Yemen — and that General Suleimani oversaw them.
In response, the C.I.A. would have observed that taking out the general would deprive Iranian moderates, like President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, of any leeway for compromise, enabling hard-liners to co-opt them. Thus, the agency would have reasoned, the killing of a hard-line national hero would most likely dissolve any hope — dim even beforehand — that Mr. Trump’s “maximum pressure” approach would move the Iranians to renegotiate the nuclear deal; it might instead stir vengeance in the Iranian leadership, which would intensify rather than subdue those activities in his name.
Had there been a distinguished senior career State Department officer on hand — there used to be many, but their numbers have dwindled in this administration — he or she might even have provided the big strategic picture: that the Trump administration’s one major contribution to American foreign policy has been to refocus attention on great-power competition. And while Russia and China are great powers, Iran really isn’t one. Pick your fights, they’d have said.
A discreet official, of course, would have elided the fact that Mr. Obama’s rebalance to Asia and diplomatic approach to Iran appreciated this reality, cutting straight to Mr. Trump’s own antipathy to committing military resources to the Middle East. But that official might well have commented, for emphasis, that the former national security adviser, John Bolton, was dismissed in part over his hawkish insistence on coercive regime change in Tehran.
That adviser could have argued that for an administration looking to manage great-power competition, it is patently illogical to elevate a regional spoiler to great-power status, antagonistically martyr one of its leaders, gratuitously invigorate nonstate militants, and set the United States on a path toward war in a region it had hoped to calm.
And a really enterprising confidant might have intimated that a sensational military operation could scan as a cynical effort to divert attention from impeachment, as well as an example of the same brand of self-interested autocracy with which the House’s articles of impeachment charge the president.
It seems like none of these points were carefully considered, revealing the abject dysfunction and deterioration of the national security process under Mr. Trump. The killing of General Suleimani arose outside of any coherent policy context, and without adequate contemplation of near- or long-term strategic consequences. Mr. Trump’s move looks like either an impetuous act of self-indulgence or, somewhat more probable, a calculated attempt to bury his domestic political troubles. Whatever the precise reason, the act itself is irreversible, and will have serious consequences — precisely why it merited the systematic deliberation that it clearly did not receive.
Suleimani Died as He Had Killed
Now the United States must establish a balance of hope and fear in the Middle East.
Reasonable people will debate the likeliest ramifications of President Trump’s decision to order the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the Revolutionary Guards Corps commander whose power in Iran was second only to that of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — and whose power in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq was arguably second to none.
What shouldn’t be in doubt is the justice.
By far the best account of Suleimani’s life was written by Dexter Filkins for The New Yorker in 2013. It’s worth reprising some of the details.
In 1998, Suleimani assumed command of the Quds Force — the Guards’ extraterritorial terrorist wing — whose prior exploits included a role in the bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people.
In 2003, Filkins wrote, “Americans received intelligence that Al Qaeda fighters in Iran,” operating with Tehran’s protection and consent, “were preparing an attack on Western targets in Saudi Arabia.” Despite U.S. warnings to Iran, terrorists “bombed three residential compounds in Riyadh, killing 35 people, including 9 Americans.”
In 2004, Suleimani “began flooding Iraq with lethal roadside bombs” known as explosively formed projectiles, which, according to retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, “killed hundreds of Americans.”
In 2005, the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, and 21 others were killed in a massive car bombing in Beirut, carried out by Hezbollah. “There were Iranians on the phones directing the attack,” one former C.I.A. official told Filkins. “If indeed Iran was involved, Suleimani was undoubtedly at the center of this.”
In 2006, Hezbollah operatives abducted and killed Israeli soldiers in an operation that, according to Filkins, was “carried out with Suleimani’s help.” It sparked a monthlong war in which thousands of people were killed.
There’s a great deal more of this. And that was just the preamble to his central role in rescuing Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and sustaining Yemen’s Houthi militia in power, goals pursued through policies of unrestricted brutality. As an agent of international mayhem, Suleimani’s peers were Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. To think of him as a worthy adversary — an Iranian Erwin Rommel — is wrong. He was an evil man who died as he had killed so many others.
The proximate reason for Suleimani’s killing, according to a Defense Department statement, is that he “was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region.” If so — and it hardly stretches credulity that he was — the strike was an act of pre-emption. No U.S. president, of any party, should ever convey to an enemy the impression it can plot attacks against Americans with impunity. To do otherwise is to invite worse.
Trump’s problem is that, until Thursday, that’s what he had done. For almost a year, an escalating series of Iranian attacks on U.S. and allied assets were met by a conspicuous failure to respond militarily. Trump also kept signaling his desire to withdraw U.S. forces from the region.
The result was to embolden the Iranians to hit harder. Instead of a calibrated cycle of escalation matched to a tacit sense of limits, the Iranians reached until they overreached. On Wednesday, Khamenei taunted Trump with the message that “there is no damn thing you can do.” The supreme leader is now a publicly humiliated man. That is enormously satisfying — and immensely dangerous. Rashness often springs from wounded pride.
One possible outcome is that a spooked Iranian leadership, already reeling from devastating sanctions and mass demonstrations, will prefer to tread lightly, at least for the time being. “Suleimani’s death could bring a sense of realism to the Islamic Republic’s thinking,” says the Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad. For 40 years, the regime has succeeded abroad because it’s been willing to play dirty games against generally feckless opponents. It may now take its time to reassess that view.
The alternative? Iran could mount a global campaign of terrorist strikes, deploying foreign proxies like Hezbollah for political deniability. It could try to take hostages at the American Embassy in Baghdad, much as it did at the embassy in Tehran in 1979. It could use its influence in Iraq to demand the expulsion of U.S. troops — “accomplishing in the wake of his death what Suleimani long tried to accomplish in life,” as Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies observes. And it could accelerate its nuclear program, forcing Trump into a major military confrontation he has been eager to avoid, especially in an election year.
The next days will be decisive. The best course for the United States is to spell out clearly to Iran what the paths of escalation — and de-escalation — hold. On the de-escalatory side, a return to the status quo ante and a willingness to explore negotiations over the full range of Iran’s malign activities, including its regional aggression and expanding nuclear program, in exchange for the easing of oil and other economic sanctions. On the escalatory side, a policy of deliberately disproportionate retaliation to any Iranian aggression, no matter whether it’s carried out by Iran or its proxies, and no matter whether it aims at us or our allies.
The clearer we are in limning the courses of hope and fear, the likelier we are to achieve a stable balance between them.