President Trump’s decision to kill Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani came just months after he canceled a strike that would have punished the downing of an American drone.
“We might have entered the phase where they pushed to the point the U.S. had to respond,” a senior Western diplomat stationed in the Middle East told the Washington Examiner.
Soleimani enjoyed roughly six months of perceived impunity after Trump did not retaliate when Iranian forces in June shot down a U.S. military drone in the Persian Gulf. When an Iranian-controlled militia attacked the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad last week, some Western analysts saw a threat to start a second Iran hostage crisis, after the 1979 incident that helped doom Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
“The embassy attack was far too reminiscent of 1979,” the Western diplomat said. ”That drives U.S. national security hawks crazy, and you have to assume the Iranians would know that.”
The June incident stopped short of killing American personnel, an act that Iranian officials were warned in May would provoke a major response. An Iranian-controlled militia crossed that line last week, killing a U.S. civilian contractor in a rocket barrage before attacking the American embassy compound in Baghdad on Tuesday.
“The conditions were met to take decisive action to eliminate a very, very, very effective terrorist in the heart of the Middle East to save hundreds of American lives,” a senior State Department official told reporters on Friday.
Trump echoed that justification earlier Friday. “General Qassem Soleimani has killed or badly wounded thousands of Americans over an extended period of time, and was plotting to kill many more…but got caught!” the president tweeted. “He should have been taken out many years ago!”
That implicit rebuke of previous presidents notwithstanding, there are signs that Trump also had declined to target Soleimani, even though American leaders knew where he was. “We have been tracking him,” a senior U.S. official said of the Iranian leader. Former White House national security adviser John Bolton underscored that Soleimani’s death was “long in the making,” as the Iranian military leader scarcely tried to hide his movements from U.S. spy agencies in recent years.
“We’ve known every minute of every day where Soleimani is for years — there’s no moment of any given day where five or six intelligence agencies can’t tell you where he is,” Bolton told Politico.
Iranian officials “just didn’t believe” U.S. threats prior to this point, the senior State Department official acknowledged, as other foreign policy experts emphasized that Iran has felt free to conduct attacks in recent months.
“By attacking tankers, shooting down a U.S. drone and bombing a Saudi oil field without US reaction, Iran believed it has established a deterrence in the region,” Gerard Araud, the former French ambassador to the United States, said in a tweet on Friday. “The attack against the US embassy in Baghdad was the step too far. The US has called the bluff.”
The airstrike removes a “devilishly ingenious” enemy, as another senior State Department official described Soleimani, from Iranian ranks. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander is credited with orchestrating one audacious and dangerous operation after another. His initiatives included rocket attacks targeting specific American officials in Iraq, a major Iranian intervention in the Syrian civil war, and a plot to assassinate a Saudi diplomat at Cafe Milano, a well-known restaurant in Washington, D.C.
“There were things he could do that nobody else could do,” the other senior State Department official said. “And we are not safe in the region as long as Iran is pursuing this general strategy, but we are safer without him than we are with him.”
