It’s not over
Iran yesterday spurned US President Donald Trump’s call for a new nuclear pact and a Iranian commander threatened more attacks after both sides appeared to back off from intensified conflict following the US killing of an Iranian general and Tehran’s retaliatory missile strikes.
Concern that the Middle East was primed for a wider war eased after Trump gave an address on Wednesday that refrained from ordering more military action. But each side’s next move in their protracted shadow war was unclear.
Iran fired 16 missiles on Wednesday at sites in Iraq where US troops were based in retaliation for the killing in a US drone attack of powerful Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad on Jan 3 Tehran’s foreign minister said this “concluded” Iran’s response to his death.
Gen Soleimani was widely held as being Iran’s second most senior official. As head of the Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds Force, he was an architect of Iranian policy in the region.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei described the missile attacks as a “slap in the face” for the US and called for an end to the American presence in the Middle East. But he said the strikes were not enough to avenge the killing.
The actions followed months of tension that has increased steadily since Washington withdrew in 2018 from Iran’s nuclear pact with world powers and reimposed sanctions that have driven down Tehran’s oil exports and hammered its economy.
Trump told Americans on Wednesday that he could have hit Iran at will but he refrained because “Iran was standing down.”
Trump also said it was time for world powers to replace Tehran’s 2015 nuclear accord with a new deal that would allow Iran to “thrive and prosper”. And he said he would impose more stringent sanctions on Iran, without specifying what that would involve.
In a letter to the UN Security Council, US Ambassador to the UN Kelly Craft, while defending Soleimani’s killing as ‘self-defense’, said the US was ready to negotiate “with the goal of preventing further endangerment of international peace and security or escalation by the Iranian regime”.
But Iran’s UN Ambassador Majid Takht Ravanchi said the US offer of talks was “unbelievable” while the US continued to enforce harsh economic sanctions on Iran.
Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards also issued new threats to Washington, with one senior commander, Abdollah Araghi, warning of “harsher revenge soon”, following the missile strikes, Iranian media reported.
Amirali Hajizadeh, the head of the Revolutionary Guards Aerospace Force, said Iran’s missile attacks on US targets in Iraq did not aim to kill American soldiers but sought to damage Washington’s “military machine” and were the start of a series of attacks across the region, state television reported.
He also said Iran had hundreds of missiles at the ready and when Tehran launched missiles on Wednesday it had used “cyber attacks to disable (U.S.) plane and drone navigation systems.”
And the new head of Iran’s Quds Force, which overseas its foreign military operations, said he would follow the course pursued by his predecessor Soleimani.
“We will continue in this luminous path with power,” Brigadier General Esmail Ghaani said. Many of Iran allied militias have vowed to avenge Soleimani’s killing.
Meanwhile, US Defense Secretary Mark Esper said that the US strike that killed the top general had restored credibility to the US threat to Tehran to restrain itself militarily.
“I believe that we’ve restored a level of deterrence with them,” he said.
But Washington security analysts say it is far from certain that Tehran has been deterred from further attacks on the United States and its allies, and that it might not be long before it challenges Trump again.
The missile attack is “just the beginning,” said Kaleigh Thomas, a Middle East security analyst at the Center for a New American Security.
Soleimani’s death in a US drone strike last Friday “has definitely changed the tone of tensions going forward,” she said.
“They’re going to be planning strategically, investing in ways to inflict pain on the United States.”
For effective deterrence, Thomas said, the Trump administration lacks a coherent message that Tehran can make sense of -- what response it can expect from the United States to what provocative actions -- as well as a back channel to communicate, like previous administrations had.
She faulted Trump’s inconsistent responses last year after the Revolutionary Guards shot down two US drones, allegedly damaged multiple tankers in the Gulf, and allegedly launched missiles on Saudi oil installations.
In each case the US response was hesitant and minimal, emboldening Tehran.
On the other hand, she said, the “impulsive decision” to kill Soleimani to re-establish deterrence appeared disproportional to Tehran’s most recent actions -- supporting rocket strikes on US installations in Iraq and backing protestors who stormed the reception building at the US embassy in Baghdad.
Tehran might now be tentative about reacting, but is “motivated to act and to find ways to inflict pain upon the United States.”
Retired General David Petraeus, who once led US forces in the Middle East, said he was optimistic that killing Soleimani delivered a strong message that Tehran will have to heed.
It was “a very significant effort to re-establish deterrence, which obviously had not been shored up by the relatively insignificant responses up until now,” Petraeus told Foreign Policy magazine.
Former US senior diplomat Nicolas Burns said it was “far too early” to declare success in delivering a credible threat message to Tehran.
“Iran has a brutal history of using proxy forces to attack the US and others,” he told AFP. “They could well do that in the coming weeks or months.”
More challenging is Tehran’s threat this week to restart its program to develop nuclear weapons by producing weapons-grade uranium.
Thomas said the US inability to deter Iran is rooted in Trump’s unilateral decision in 2018 to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal which froze that program, and place more sanctions on the country.
After that, she said, “I think it was it was total confusion about what United States actually wanted from Iran.”
And one misstep from either sides can ignite a series of events which might trigger another crisis too big to control.
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