The specificity and scale of Iranian threats that have followed Saturday’s terrorist attack in Ahvaz indicate that Iran will retaliate against those it blames for the attack. And while Saudi Arabia and the UAE are at the top of Iran’s blame list, the U.S. and Israel are also being mentioned.
The Ahvaz attackers, likely either Arab-separatists or ISIS, targeted a military parade and killed at least 25 people. But Iran is already throwing blame at its key adversaries. On Monday, Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei seemed to promise retaliation.
According to reports, #AhvazTerrorAttack was carried out by the same people who, whenever trapped in Syria or Iraq, U.S. comes to save them. They’re funded by #Saudi and #UAE regimes. Undoubtedly, we will rigorously punish the masterminds behind the attack. pic.twitter.com/j0TvF8TGQi
— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) September 24, 2018
Alongside Khamenei, the Iranian revolutionary guard corps, or IRGC, is also fuming, with one senior general claiming that Iran has evidence the U.S. directed Saudi Arabia to carry out the attack, and that Iran’s response will be “annihilating and destructive.”
This allegation of U.S. involvement is an IRGC fairy tale, but it is possible — though unlikely — that the Saudis had some role in supporting the attackers. Regardless, it is notable that the more moderate elements of the Iranian regime are also threatening retaliation: President Hassan Rouhani retweeted a threat from his foreign minister Javad Zarif, promising a “swift” response against the U.S.
This unity of anger and purpose is telling in that it draws contrast with the increasingly bitter divisions that otherwise define the Iranian polity. In turn, it suggests either that the Iranians truly believe they have evidence of Saudi complicity in the attack, or that Rouhani’s more-moderate faction believes it cannot constrain some form of hardliner response. In the context of Iran’s major economic pressures and the more moderate faction’s interest in mitigating U.S. oil sanctions due to enter force in November, we might have expected the more-moderates to choose more cautious rhetoric.
But the Iranian regime’s various factions feel increasingly boxed in and desperate. And while that sense of desperation is an underlying objective of the Trump administration’s Iran policy, Iran’s reaction to this attack shows how things could spin out of control. The Trump administration must proceed cautiously here. Maintaining pressure on the Iranian hardliners, Trump should offer an olive branch to Rouhani in an attempt to move the needle away from a bloody showdown and toward an improved Iranian nuclear agreement.
At the same time, the U.S. must make clear to Tehran that it will not quietly tolerate any violent Iranian (or Iranian proxy) action against U.S. interests either in the Middle East, or elsewhere.
