There are withdrawals, and then, there are withdrawals.
You can flee, desperate and defeated, as from Saigon in 1975, or you can back slowly out of the door, emptying cartridge after cartridge at your foes as you edge away.
The ayatollahs were gambling on the United States pursuing the first option. They saw the way Washington had suddenly abandoned its Kurdish allies in Syria. They followed reports of the impeachment proceedings. They saw President Trump talk repeatedly about avoiding wars in the Middle East. So they turned the screw, encouraging attacks on U.S. installations. In a deliberate echo of the siege of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran four decades earlier, they incited an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
To their surprise, the United States struck back — promptly, accurately, and lethally. Gen. Qassem Soleimani became the highest-ranking enemy soldier taken out by American missiles since Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, who was blown out of the sky in 1943 on his way to inspect troops.
If the commanding officer of a hostile force is not a legitimate target, it is hard to think who is.
Depressingly, and utterly predictably, the argument in Washington about the legality of the strike has broken down along party lines. It always does. But whether or not Soleimani got what he deserved legally, it is hard to deny that he got what he deserved morally.
What, though, of the strategic implications? Was the death of Soleimani, like the execution of the Duke of Enghien in 1804, “worse than a crime, a blunder”?
The answer depends on whether you see a significant continuing role for the U.S. in the region. If you do, you might reasonably fret that the assassination has bolstered the mullahs. Iran’s aspiration to regional hegemony always ran up against the reality that it is neither Arab nor Sunni. Even the ayatollahs’ more limited ambition to present themselves as the champions and protectors of all Shiite communities, whether in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, or Yemen, is constrained by ethnic and linguistic boundaries.
Iraqi Shiites regard themselves as the true leaders of their denomination. Karbala, where Muhammad’s grandsons Hussein and Hasan were killed in 680 A.D., arguably the key historical event for Shiites, is in Iraq. So is Najaf, where Imam Ali, whose partisans were the original Shiites, is buried. Many Arab Shiites regard the Persians as Zoroastrian latecomers.
The mullahs had been losing ground, even on their doorstep. Regular street protests were raging in Iraq against Iranian-backed politicians and militias, with many young Iraqi Shiites among the ranks of the demonstrators. Something similar was happening in Iran itself, where students and dissidents were taking to the streets as the economy contracted.
Suddenly, all of that has been reversed. Iranians have reacted as people almost always react to an outside attack: by drawing together and rallying to their regime. More than this, Soleimani’s death has, in the eyes of many of his co-religionists, turned him from a murderer into a martyr. Sacrifice has a peculiar significance for Shiites. They honor Hussein as the “Prince of Martyrs,” and the lesson they draw from his tragic death at Karbala is that sacrifice is unending.
It is hard to see many tactical upsides. Even the Saudis, whom Trump evidently sees as his key regional allies, could hardly do enough in the aftermath to emphasize that it had nothing to do with them.
Measured purely in the currency of continuing U.S. influence in the region, Soleimani’s killing must be reckoned a failure. Sympathy has swung away from Washington and toward Tehran.
But what if Trump is serious and no longer cares about U.S. influence in the Middle East? What if he calculates that, as the U.S. becomes the world’s largest oil producer, the strategic case for an American presence in the region has become obsolete? What if he is sincere in his desire to pull the troops out — in good order, to be sure, but as swiftly as practically possible? What if he simply wants to make clear, as he departs, that any actions directed against the U.S. will be met by a terrible and disproportionate reaction?
If that is his goal, then surely he has succeeded. He has always made it clear that he regards the maintenance of overseas garrisons as an unnecessary drain on the treasury. His task, therefore, is to wind them down without encouraging every anti-American militant to rush whooping and screaming into the newly vacated territory. How best to achieve that objective? By making it clear that there will be a personal cost to the paramilitary leaders and militia commanders involved. Maybe it’s not such a bad approach.
