(Part 1) Iran: Who was General Qassem Soleimani?

At the end of 2019 I was contemplating my next post here with the thought that 2020 might be a bad year. Then, on January 3, the USA assassinated General Qassam Soleimani, the leader of the Iranian Quds Force with a drone strike at the Baghdad airport and I knew was I was onto something.

I chose the video above out of a plethora of similar videos because this one is short and to the point. A detail I would add: Soleimani was not a cleric, he was not a religious man that people bowed down to because they think they're supposed to. He was a general, a bureaucrat, a diplomat, a powerful secular man. He was arguably more important than the Iraqi president or even any of the Mullahs. This guy knew where the bodies were buried, he knew the numbers to the bank accounts, he knew all the friends and all the enemies and he moved amongst all of that. For the USA to cut him down in a single sudden move is an amazingly bold stroke that will surely invite a larger war.

....Or will it?

The Trump administration is suggesting that this strike was justified because of reports of possible forthcoming attacks on allied forces. If you will recall, the Brits bristled at similar American paranoia last summer so the idea that imminent danger is a reasonable excuse will be challenged; that said, the Germans did not bristle at such reports and stood by the Americans at the time, so perhaps imminent danger will have its supporters (there's probably a time limit on how long that debate will matter, we'll see if the distinction is even important). The fact that Soleimani was in Baghdad meeting with local militia forces after a similar visit to Syria is probably the only evidence the Americans have (or will offer) to the notion that Soleimani was plotting something big.

Tensions have been simmering between USA and Iran for several months (well, several decades) and I'd say this move is the retaliation for Iran's strike on a Saudi oil refinery back in September (which produced no response at the time).  Look at this picture:



Dude, Tom Brady in his prime wasn't this accurate! When seeing the unbelievable accuracy of Iranian missiles (or was it drones?), the Pentagon must have known some real shit was on the way. (My first thought when seeing this pic was, "Oh shit! They can do that?") And this came, as you will recall, after several months of shenanigans in the Persian Gulf and presaged a series of protests across Iraq. When one of those protests finally got into the American green zone in Baghdad, the Americans acted (*) by taking out Soleimani.

Okay, so what now? Well, as I write this there are reports of Iranian rocket launches on American bases in Iraq. That was predictable. I'd say keeping these Iraqi protests going is the next step for both sides, which calls attention to what I've been thinking all along: in the beginning this is about control of Iraq.

In 2003, George Bush invaded Iraq with the intention (I believe) of establishing 1) a battleground for Arab extremists and Americans to go at it and/or 2) a neutral ground between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Iraqi Shia threw off American overtures, forcing the Americans to maintain their Iraqi positions by shielding the Sunnis (which was precisely NOT the original mission). Once Obama removed American forces it sent the Sunnis into a freak tornado that produced Daesh (or ISIS, if you prefer). Daesh was able to grab impressive swaths of territory along the Euphrates River across the Iraq-Syria frontier and, in the end, had no allies whatsoever. Indeed, the emergence of Daesh is what brought Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Kurds, Israel, NATO, Russia and USA all together and set the stage for where we are now.

Since Obama pulled out American troops and Daesh rose, Iraq has been steadily infiltrated by paramilitary units (PMUs) largely supported by Iran. Over the years the Americans have insisted that the Iraqi parliament must decide how to deal with these PMUs, whether to expel them completely (and...how does that get done?) or incorporate them as a national military (also, a probably impossible task). But for Baghdad to truly control Iraq, they must control or dispel the PMUs. The aforementioned Iraqi protests began in the Shia area and spread because....well protestors often don't know what they really want. The Americans were encouraged by this because they interpreted this as anti-Iran (and it may have been). But outside of ousting the Prime Minister in December, I don't see that much else got accomplished except the communication of a basic unease in the face of the powers that be. The PMUs are still out there, supporting the protests in some cases and brutally suppressing them in others.

So how does Iraq deal with the murder of Iran's greatest soldier on their soil? I don't know. But Iran will ramp up its influence on the PMUs and USA will have to find the weaknesses in Iraqi support of the PMUs to fight back. That is undoubtedly the first step for both sides if a full-on war is actually coming.



(*) Ehh...that was the excuse, anyway. Those protests had been raging for months, it was only a matter of time that protestors ended up at the American embassy. The idea that Americans were truly threatened is probably an exaggeration or that Iran had anything to do with it is probably mostly fabricated.