Defense Secretary Mark Esper had a direct message to Iran and its Shia militia proxies in Iraq this week: If you dare to take shots at an American or an American facility, you can expect a very strong response. “The game has changed,” Esper told reporters during a Pentagon press gaggle on Jan. 2. The United States will not only respond to additional rocket attacks but will order preemptive strikes on Shia militia targets if Washington gets wind of an operation.
The targeted killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard commander Qassem Soleimani, the most legendary general in the Islamic Republic’s 40-year history, is bound to upend the region with a chaos we may have never seen.
One would have hoped the tension between the U.S. and Iran’s proxies would have dissipated the moment thousands of Iraqis demonstrating against Washington’s retaliatory airstrikes vacated the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad. This, unfortunately, hasn’t been the case. The situation in Iraq, a country that already has a basket of political and economic problems, is only getting hairier.
Five days after U.S. airstrikes on five Kataib Hezbollah outposts in Syria and Iraq, the U.S. struck Baghdad International Airport, leaving four people dead. Along with Soleimani, Mohammed Ridha, the head of protocol for the Popular Mobilization Forces, was killed. PMF deputy chief Abu Mahdi al Muhandis, already treated by the U.S. as a terrorist, was included in the toll as well.
All of this comes as the Pentagon has reportedly put 4,000 additional troops on stand-by, on top of the 750 paratroopers recently deployed to the Middle East in response to the recent events around the embassy. If these deployment orders are designed to establish deterrence against members of the Popular Mobilization Forces who have sent rockets flying into joint Iraqi-U.S. military facilities since October, it’s unlikely it will have the intended effect. Just as likely: Tehran will encourage Shia militias like Kataib Hezbollah to launch more rockets, take Western citizens captive, or stir up the kinds of protests that will force the Iraqi government to distance itself from Washington.
Force protection is entirely appropriate. No president, Republican or Democrat, likes to see Americans killed in violence overseas. Some degree of retaliation is appropriate and often inevitable; in today’s political climate, failing to retaliate to a hostile act, particularly when an American is killed, will get everybody in the Beltway riled up, where righteous condemnation and Monday-morning-quarterbacking is common on a normal day.
Yet there is a big difference between retaliation that is measured and retaliation that forces the original offender to lash out in fear of being seen as weak, cowed, or scared straight. The strikes on Popular Mobilization Forces leadership, coupled with the possible increase in the U.S. troop presence in Iraq, is exactly the kind of mix that could lead to a quick and uncontrollable escalation. More U.S. troops in Iraq means more potential targets for Popular Mobilization Forces retaliation, even if those personnel are confined to a few facilities.
There is also a mighty difference between a concerted response and the targeted assassination of a general whose rank in Iran is about as significant as a 4-Star officer on the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Targeting a figure as senior as Soleimani will assure a violent Iranian military response against the U.S. or its security partners in the region. Whether the Trump administration is prepared for this eventuality is doubtful. That the White House would go ahead with the operation anyway, while also sending more deployment orders, is either a sign of willful stupidity or preemptive war-making.
The thing about using force is that nobody can predict with absolute certainty how the side who gets hit will react. The Trump administration may be confident that increasing U.S. military muscle in Iraq will compel Iran-backed militias to blink. But what if U.S. actions merely add more petrol to the fire now burning in Iraq? And what if we revisit this series of events next week and conclude that additional deployments simply sparked an even more deadly confrontation?
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
