President Joe Biden deserves credit for authorizing a U.S. drone strike against a senior commander within Iran‘s preeminent Iraqi militia, Kata’ib Hezbollah. Distinct from the Lebanese Hezbollah, the group killed Americans at Iran’s behest during the U.S. 2003-2011 deployment to Iraq. Offering an element of poetic justice, the Kata’ib Hezbollah commander was killed in an area of eastern Baghdad where the group previously shot and blew up many American soldiers.
To be clear, the man killed on Wednesday was not Kata’ib Hezbollah’s top leader, Ahmad al Hamidawi. He remains alive and should be targeted the moment Kata’ib Hezbollah kills or seriously wounds another American.
Still, the utility of this strike goes beyond its higher value target(s) and more potent delivery of force than the political pyrotechnics Biden ordered last week. By hitting Kata’ib Hezbollah decisively where and when the group felt secure, the U.S. will have, at least temporarily, introduced a new risk calculus into militia and IRGC movements and activity. At the margin, it will increase friction in their decision-making, logistics, and other activities. It will force them to adopt greater operational security measures in an attempt to better evade future detection.
Iranian-led hostile interests will look at this U.S. action through the prism of the Joint Special Operations Command and CIA campaigns which relentlessly targeted them in the 2006-2009 period. U.S. action of this kind should continue so as to reinforce this understanding and the associated challenges it poses. As former CIA operations officer Marc Polymeropoulos notes, when unleashed, the effects that the U.S. intelligence-special operations communities can produce are significant. Iran knows this.
On another positive note, there are indications that an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander may have also been killed in Wednesday’s strike. Considering that the Biden administration likely knows exactly who was in the vehicle at the time, it may be playing down the IRGC casualty to avoid antagonizing Iran. And that possibility speaks to the broader strategic challenge.
Because this action won’t alone get Iran to stop its onslaught against U.S. personnel in the Middle East. To achieve that necessary objective, both Iran and its associated militias must come to understand that their more valued interests will be held at risk whenever they kill Americans.
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The question is whether decisive surprise U.S. strikes like this will continue. And again, although Biden deserves credit here, I fear that the administration will be unlikely to carry out more strikes in kind. The pattern of U.S. retaliation against Iran in recent months has been decidedly hesitant and limited. If Iran perceives this latest action as a fleeting UFO-style blip on the radar, its appetite to carry out further attacks will grow in kind. Iran’s crucial patronage toward and ideological influence over militias like Kata’ib Hezbollah means that it can direct these groups to take actions even where painful U.S. retaliation against them is likely to follow. From a U.S. deterrence-security perspective, the key is thus to ensure that Iran understands its direct interests will suffer in substantive fashion where and when it deploys proxies to kill Americans.
But on Wednesday, at least, Biden did well.
