President Biden sidestepped a clash with Iran that could erode the United States’s political influence in Baghdad through his decision to retaliate against recent attacks in Iraq by striking a base in Syria.
Biden’s team has avoided putting political pressure on Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al Kadhimi as rocket attacks continued apace in recent weeks. While former President Donald Trump’s administration paired intense private demands for the Iraqi government to protect U.S. personnel in the country with high-profile retaliatory strikes if any Iran-linked fighter killed an American, the Biden administration has made a point to adopt a deferential posture in public.
“Every time the U.S. attacks [in] Iraq, there’s a general criticism in Iraq that the U.S. forces should be pushed out,” a Middle Eastern official said Friday. “So here, they are saying, ‘The attack was in Iraq, but we are retaliating outside of Iraq,’ to avoid Iraq internal criticism.”
“This particular strike was based on intelligence that we had and that our Iraqi and Kurdish partners helped develop about the types of facilities that were being used by, we believe, the two groups that were responsible for these recent attacks,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell earlier Friday.
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Kirby’s tone appeared tuned to the pitch of Iraqi politicians who denounced the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani last year, which also claimed the life of an Iraqi Shiite militia leader who operated under the auspices of the central government while aligning with Tehran, as a grave violation of Iraqi sovereignty. The strike on Thursday night, a response to a flurry of rocket attacks in Erbil and other Iraqi cities, is less likely to provoke such a response.
“It’s a balancing act,” the Middle Eastern official said. “The prime minister in Iraq, in my opinion, doesn’t want the U.S. to be out. … But in Parliament, you have the Shiite parties that, on the one hand, also need the U.S. there but, on the other hand, for political purposes, cannot keep silence if the U.S. is going to be inside Iraq.”
Within the Iraqi borders, Kadhimi’s government is pursuing a lower-profile effort to clip the wings of the Iran-aligned militants who conducted three attacks in the span of a week this month. There, too, U.S. officials have made a point to hang back.
“The president and the secretary have spoken to our Iraqi partners, and we are supporting their investigation,” a State Department official told the Washington Examiner. “We are aware of one arrest that was made in relation to the Erbil attack. We defer to the government of Iraq and Kurdistan Regional Government for further details.”
Kadhimi’s efforts to curtail Iranian power in the country are fraught with risk, given the nature of the problem. At least one operation to arrest Iranian-backed militants last year ended in alarm and embarrassment, as the offending groups threatened Kadhimi’s house in a successful bid to force him to free their associates.
“That whole incident really showed the prime minister’s difficulty because he does want to hold people accountable,” an official involved in U.S.-Iraqi relations said. “On the other hand, he has to live in this situation and in this environment, and it’s very difficult for him to proceed.”
‘No justification’
Biden might have avoided an outcry in Baghdad, but his ranging into Syria provoked criticism from Congress, where members of his own party faulted him for conducting a military authorization on shaky legal ground.
“There is absolutely no justification for a president to authorize a military strike that is not in self-defense against an imminent threat without congressional authorization,” Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said on Friday. “We need to extricate from the Middle East, not escalate.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki rebuffed that criticism, justifying the strike as a matter of self-defense.
“The president is sending an unambiguous message that he’s going to act to protect Americans, and when threats are posed, he has the right to take an action at the time and in the manner of his choosing,” she said. “He also is going to take those actions in a manner that’s deliberative and that has the objective of de-escalating activity in both Syria and Iraq.”
Kirby struck a similar note, saying, “The United States did act in a very proportionate, deliberate way, and it’s certainly in nobody’s interest to see this escalate.”
Still, the careful effort to circumscribe the retaliatory operation risks leaving the impression that Biden opted for a political strike rather than a substantive punishment.
“Biden has avoided embarrassing Kadhimi, but at the same time, he has avoided being effective,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin said, noting that the strike didn’t target Iranian positions as directly as the militias targeted Americans. “This strike wasn’t proportional — it was less than proportional.”
The Middle Eastern official disagreed, arguing that the targeted base carried strategic and symbolic significance for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, which Soleimani led at the time of his death.
“It’s an important hub for the Quds Force. As far as I know, it was created by Soleimani,” the official said.
In any case, the problem of Iran-controlled forces in Iraq remains severe and threatens to allow Tehran to co-opt the legitimate Iraqi government, just as Iran’s main terror proxy, Hezbollah, emerged as a political force in Lebanon.
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“There needs to be a very clear and long-term commitment — not just by the United States but also by other friends of Iraq who support Iraq in this way and support Iraq to become an independent sovereign state with a regular army that is answerable to the prime minister,” the official involved in U.S.-Iraqi relations said.
