Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s team is not hurrying to blame Iran for an explosion near the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, despite alarm that the regime will attack American forces in Iraq.
“A low-grade rocket did land within the International Zone near the U.S. Embassy,” a State Department spokesperson told the Washington Examiner on Monday. “At present there are no claims of responsibility.”
It was a relatively temperate comment from an administration that has been accused of looking for an excuse to go to war with Iran. Some Democratic critics suggested that Trump might even be touting faulty intelligence to justify a bellicose strategy last week, but, hours after the Sunday explosion, Pompeo’s subordinates downplayed the incident.
“There were no casualties or significant damage; no U.S.-inhabited facility was impacted,” the State Department spokesperson said. “We are in close and continuing contact with senior Iraqi officials regarding this incident and investigating the circumstances.”
The rocket, which fell Sunday night in central Baghdad, was reportedly of a Soviet-designed weapon commonly used by Iranian-backed militias. The explosion was heard less than a week after Pompeo ordered a partial evacuation of the diplomatic facility amid reports that Iranian-controlled forces were plotting potential attacks against Americans in the country. But Iraqi officials with close ties to Iran took a conciliatory tone Monday, warning that “if war is ignited, everyone will be burned.”
Trump warned Sunday afternoon that “if Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran” in a tweet. But the State Department’s tone Monday suggests the administration is content for the current standoff, which has developed over the last month as the United States has tightened sanctions on the regime, to end with a whimper rather than a bang, according to experts close to the administration.
“I think the administration would be happy if things just sort of drifted off,” the Heritage Foundation’s James Jay Carafano, who provided foreign policy advice to Trump’s State Department transition team, told the Washington Examiner.
That includes Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton, who is widely regarded as too eager to launch a military strike on the regime’s nuclear program and paired with Pompeo in ramping up a “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran after withdrawing from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal last year.
“Part of that pressure campaign is to ensure that the Iranians believe that we are prepared to use force,” Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Washington Examiner. “I don’t think you’d get Pompeo, Bolton, or the president in agreement that they should respond militarily, directly against Iran, for this type of attack. I’m sure that all three gentlemen would vote ‘no’ on that, but it would get more interesting if U.S. servicemen were to actually die.”
The State Department emphasized the Sunday attack fell short of that threshold. “We take this incident very seriously,” the spokesperson said. “We have made clear over the past two weeks and again underscore that attacks on U.S. personnel and facilities will not be tolerated and will be responded to in a decisive manner. We will hold Iran responsible if any such attacks are conducted by its proxy militia forces or elements of such forces, and will respond to Iran accordingly.”
