Iran retaliates for the killing of Qassem Suleimani
Rocket-fire will probably not slake the thirst for revenge against America
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“WE WILL TAKE revenge.” The words were those of Major-General Hossein Salami, head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), speaking at the funeral of Qassem Suleimani, the head of the IRGC’s elite Quds Force.
The sentiment has pervaded the rhetoric of virtually every Iranian spokesman since General Suleimani’s assassination on January 3rd. At his funeral on January 6th his daughter warned that the families of American soldiers “will spend their days waiting for the death of their children”.
In the early hours of January 8th Iran struck its first blows, firing what it claimed were 22 ballistic missiles at two military bases in Iraq that host sizeable numbers of American troops—the Ain al-Asad base in western Iraq and another facility in Erbil, in the north. Experts analysing early footage said that some of the rockets appeared to be precision-guided Fateh missiles, capable of carrying over 200kg of explosives.
Despite the bloodcurdling rhetoric and mutual threats, however, both sides seemed keen to avoid a rush to war. Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, said on Twitter that Iran had “concluded proportionate measures in self-defence”. He added: “We do not seek escalation or war, but will defend ourselves against any aggression.” In fact, although Iranian state television said 80 “American terrorists” had been killed, Iran seems to have tried to limit or avoid casualties.
The office of the Iraqi prime minister said the Iranians had given advance notice of the missile strikes, and the Pentagon and Iraqi officials said there were no casualties. At a press conference later in the day President Donald Trump said that Iran appeared to be “standing down”. He threatened no retaliation for the attack and concentrated instead on the need for greater pressure on Iran from countries such as Britain, Germany and China, and from NATO.
But even if the attacks were intended as a largely symbolic reprisal to show the Iranian public that its government was taking action, they are unlikely to be the final word. Seeming to contradict his foreign minister, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, Iran’s supreme leader, said that such military action was “not sufficient”. And he spelled out Iran’s long-term goal: “What is important is ending the corrupting presence of America in the region.”
Iran has a long history of violence against its enemies, often stretching halfway around the world—from Buenos Aires to Bangkok—to wreak vengeance. After the publicly acknowledged missile attack, it could revert to its long-standing practice of acting behind the cloak of secrecy, or at least of the militias it has sponsored around the region. Its global reach has been enabled in part by a Shia diaspora; there are large communities in South-East Asia, south-eastern Europe and even Latin America.
In exacting further retribution, Iran’s challenge will be to craft a response that befits the severity of its loss and the fury of the ruling clerics, without provoking America, and its mercurial president, into a spasm of such violence that it endangers the survival of a regime beset by economic sanctions and anti-government protests at home. And beneath that calculation lies a game of nuclear brinkmanship that has underpinned the crisis for years.
Iran has various means at its disposal: maritime disruption; cyber warfare; attacks on America’s forces in the region or on its Gulf allies and Israel; terrorism against civilians farther afield; or even the assassination of a figure of comparable stature to General Suleimani.
The naval option is limited. Iran has often threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil exports must pass, if attacked. But Western military experts think that any closure could be reversed in weeks, given the weak state of Iran’s conventional military equipment.
In May 2019, in response to tightening American sanctions, Iran embarked on an undeclared campaign of harassment against international shipping. On January 7th America warned merchant shipping that Iran might take aim at American vessels. But it is now trickier for Iran to pull off such attacks. Since September an American-led naval coalition of seven countries—the International Maritime Security Construct—has been guarding the strait; a French-led European force will shortly begin its own patrols.
Without the need for deniability, Iran might simply hurl anti-ship cruise missiles at American warships, but these can also be parried through decoys and other countermeasures. Strategists have speculated that Iran could use its fleet of 3,000 to 5,000 speedboats to mount swarming attacks on larger warships in the confined waters of the Persian Gulf, though this concept remains untested.
Cyber-attacks have proved effective in the past. “Incidents involving Iran have been among the most sophisticated, costly, and consequential attacks in the history of the internet,” note Collin Anderson, a cybersecurity researcher, and Karim Sadjadpour, an expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank, in a report published in 2018. In 2012 Iranian hackers succeeded in wiping out 30,000 computers of Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company.
Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity company, says that the financial, defence, and oil-and-gas sectors are the most likely targets of disruption. These could take the form of crude denial-of-service attacks, in which servers are bombarded with messages.
Yet Iran’s offensive cyber capabilities are probably of limited use against America, says a former British official with knowledge of the issue. “I don’t believe the Iranians have the capability to penetrate US classified systems or industrial-control systems and generally to cause them serious military harm,” he says. Iran “will feel over-matched on cyber and deeply vulnerable” to retaliation.
A little help from Friends
Naval potshots and cyber-skirmishing may not fit Iran’s present purposes of ridding the region of American forces. On January 5th Iraq’s parliament passed a non-binding resolution to expel foreign (ie, American) forces. A day later, a letter from the American military commander in Iraq, hastily withdrawn by the Pentagon, suggested that Americans were preparing to leave.
To try to push America out, Iran will look to its broad network of friends and allies across the region. This would also amount to a posthumous tribute: General Suleimani did more than anyone to deepen Iran’s ties with militia and rebel groups such as Hizbullah in Lebanon, Kataib Hizbullah in Iraq and the Houthi movement in Yemen, all of which have been battle-hardened in recent wars.
Though these groups do not blindly follow Iranian direction, the relationship between them is now so deep that Iran’s network has developed into a “sovereign capability to conduct remote warfare and influence operations”, concluded a detailed study published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think-tank, in November. “It now tips the balance of effective force in the region in Iran’s favour,” said the report.
In the past year Iran has used its regional networks to turn up the heat on America and its allies. The Houthi movement in Yemen has lobbed increasing numbers of Iranian-made drones and missiles over ever-longer distances, sending them smashing into Saudi airports and Emirati radars. Iraqi militia groups have also increased their rocket fire against bases hosting American troops; the attack which killed an American contractor on December 27th, precipitating the current crisis, was the 11th such bombardment in the previous two months.
The missile attacks on January 8th are likely to presage a period of more intense pressure on American troops. One option would be to graduate from sporadic bombardment to return to a more sustained campaign of roadside bombs, as happened in the early years of America’s occupation of Iraq, or more spectacular assaults. In 1983 large suicide-bombs struck American and French barracks in Lebanon. They killed more than 300 people, including 241 American military personnel.
Though responsibility for the bombings are still debated, American officials now believe that they were conducted by the embryonic Hizbullah, with Iran’s support. The suicide-bombings, then a novelty in the Middle East, hastened the withdrawal of American and other peacekeeping forces from Lebanon. Decades later, relentless Hizbullah attacks also pushed the Israelis out of the country.
Iran has also been happy to blow up diplomats, intelligence officers and even ordinary civilians to make a point. In 1992, Hizbullah blew up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in response to Israel’s assassination of the group’s leader, Abbas Musawi, a month earlier. Two years later, it bombed a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires.
In 2012 Hizbullah was also blamed for a suicide-bombing of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria and botched assaults on Israeli diplomats in places as far afield as Thailand, India and Georgia. The attacks were thought to be reprisals for the assassination of several Iranian nuclear scientists in the preceding years, probably by Israel.
On January 5th Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah’s leader, insisted that his fighters would not go after civilians such as “traders, journalists, engineers, and doctors”. They “cannot be touched,” he insisted. This should be taken with a grain of salt: hostage-taking was a favoured tactic in the 1980s. Iran-backed groups captured journalists, preachers and aid workers.
The grisliest case involved William F. Buckley, the CIA’s station chief in Beirut, who was kidnapped by Hizbullah in 1984, tortured for 14 months and killed. America’s large expatriate population of businesspeople in the Gulf offer easy pickings.
Some former officials reckon that Iran has its sights on a figure of equivalent stature to General Suleimani. “The Iranians will probably feel it necessary to avenge the killing of Suleimani by attempting to assassinate a similarly ranked US official,” says Michael Morell, a former acting director of the CIA who now hosts the Intelligence Matters podcast. “They will do so at a place and time of their choosing, which could be months from now.”
Senior American military officers, both in war zones like Afghanistan, where an American general was shot and wounded in October 2018, and peacetime bases, like those in the Gulf and Europe, are likely to look nervously over their shoulder for the foreseeable future.
Fissile brinkmanship
For all their bravado, Iranian leaders harbour genuine fears over the consequences of a large-scale American aerial attack. The mass mobilisation in response to General Suleimani’s death suggests that a strike on Iranian military forces might well bolster popular support for the regime. But if America were to strike at the leadership in Iran, or the country’s power and energy infrastructure, serious political instability could yet ensue.
All this will strengthen the appeal of a nuclear shield. On January 5th Iran abandoned the last of several restrictions on uranium enrichment that it had accepted under the 2015 nuclear deal negotiated with the American administration of Barack Obama. Mr Trump repudiated it in May 2018, setting the stage for the present crisis. He began his press conference on January 8th by stating that Iran would never be allowed on his watch to acquire a nuclear weapon.
Though Iran has not formally left the pact, or booted out international inspectors, it is signalling that it is willing once more to expand its nuclear programme. This would gradually shorten its “break-out time”—how long it takes to produce a bomb’s worth of weapons-grade fissile material.
Should Iran reinstall centrifuges that it mothballed under the deal, add to its stockpile of enriched uranium and refine it closer to weapons-grade levels, its break-out time could shrink to months or even weeks before the year was out. That would force America and Israel back onto the horns of a dilemma they faced during the 2010s: attack Iran pre-emptively and risk setting the region ablaze, or accept the risk that the regime might quickly produce a bomb.
Yet even a full-scale air campaign would not settle the matter. A study published by former American diplomats and military officers in 2012 concluded that air strikes on Iranian nuclear sites could delay Iran’s programme by only four years, and would probably increase Iranian motivation for building a nuclear weapon in secret—in much the same way that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq redoubled its clandestine nuclear endeavours after the Israeli bombing of its reactor in 1981.
After America’s agony in Iraq, it is hard to imagine any American president considering a ground invasion of Iran. After all, Mr Trump was elected on the promise to get out of the Middle East’s forever wars.
So, in a cycle of Iranian reprisal and American escalation, it is far from clear who would have the upper hand in the nuclear crisis that will surely follow.
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