War In The Age of Trump. Patrick Cockburn
Kuwait in 1990. The Iranians, for their part, have also been discreet about their cooperation with Washington. For much of the time after the US invasion of 2003, the Americans were dealing with Soleimani—knowingly, but at a distance. Both Washington and Tehran had to agree on the appointments of all Iraqi presidents and prime ministers. In 2006, the US ambassador proposed Nouri al-Maliki as prime minister: at first he was thought to be close to the Americans, but later shifted towards Iran. The same system was operating up to 2018. The basis for this co-operation was that both sides had an interest in keeping a stable Shia-dominated government in power in Baghdad, even if they vied to bring it under their own respective influence. The link between Tehran and Washington was closest after Isis captured Mosul in 2014 and its fighters were advancing on Baghdad, something both governments were determined to stop. “They shake their fists at each other over the table, but shake hands under it,” was the cynical Iraqi saying about the US-Iran relationship.
Soleimani was important in Iraqi and regional politics, but not quite as significant as he liked to pretend. Iraqi politicians in Baghdad were irritated by his grandstanding, especially his habit of having himself photographed with pro-Iranian paramilitaries and implicitly crediting himself for victories over Isis that leaders in Baghdad saw as their own. Iraqi leaders were not alone in their criticism: last year the online magazine The Intercept published secret cables from officers of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) stationed in Iraq between 2013 and 2015. Many of these documents concern Soleimani, and one of them speculates that his high profile on the battlefield was a way of preparing for a future presidential bid in Iran. Of course, feuding between rival intelligence agencies like Quds and MOIS is notorious in every country, but in this case the contemporary portrait of Soleimani drawn by the MOIS agents looks convincing. They were particularly troubled about the degree to which Soleimani’s reliance on Shia militias fighting in Sunni areas in Iraq was fuelling sectarianism and leading Sunnis to blame Iran for atrocities. An intelligence agent described a successful attack on Jurf al-Saqr, a strategically crucial Isis-held town close to the main road south of Baghdad. Among those taking part were fighters from Asaib Ahl al-Haq, a paramilitary group close to Iran. But victory had been followed by a massacre of Sunni inhabitants. “It is mandatory and necessary to put some limits … on the violence being inflicted against innocent Sunni people in Iraq and the things that Mr. Soleimani is doing,” wrote the agent. He added that whatever happened to Sunnis, directly or indirectly, would be blamed on Iran. In the event, the surviving Sunni were driven out of Jurf al-Saqr and have not been allowed to return.
Soleimani was certainly a good tactician in the fields of militarised politics and low-level guerrilla warfare in which Iran has always specialised. “They have a PhD in that type of war,” commented one Iraqi politician. But Soleimani was not the first or the only commander in the Middle East to specialise in asymmetric warfare, which differs little from old-fashioned guerrilla strategy of attacking a militarily superior enemy at their weakest point. In the case of its confrontation with the US, Iran was eager to militarise the conflict and maintain a continuing sense of crisis, but to stay just below the level of an all-out military conflict which they want to avoid. The limited Iranian ballistic missile strikes on US bases in Iraq in January shows that this is still the Iranian strategy. Iran may want to halt, or at any rate reduce the pinprick attacks on Saudi Arabia and UAE, and concentrate instead on forcing US forces out of Iraq through political pressure. But in the long run Iran probably has no choice but to resume low-level warfare, whatever the risks, as its only viable response to sanctions.
How that might unfold is unclear for the moment but Soleimani’s death makes it easier to adapt his failed policies in Iraq to new circumstances. His vice-regal airs, high visibility, the arrogance of the pro-Iran Hashd, and their unrestrained violence towards protesters, have seriously damaged Iran’s reputation, particularly in the Shia community that had only recently looked on Iran as its saviour from Isis. Polls show that the proportion of Iraqis with a favourable attitude towards Iran fell from 90 percent in 2015 to less than 50 per cent in 2018. Those who said they saw Iran as a threat to Iraqi sovereignty rose from 25 percent to 58 percent over the same period. One Iraqi analyst in Baghdad was quoted at the end of last year as saying that he thought the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei should put Soleimani in jail because of the damage he had done to Iran’s reputation in Iraq.
Soleimani miscalculated the response to repression of the Iraqi protesters, who refused to leave the streets or respond in kind to gunfire—because every Iraq family owns a gun, this showed great restraint. He similarly underestimated the likelihood that Trump would eventually react strongly. And that he would even be prepared to go to war if Iran kept up its needling attacks, such as limpet mines attached to oil tankers off the UAE coast, or allowing pro-Iran protesters to penetrate the outer gates of the US embassy in Baghdad as they did in December. The belief that Trump would avoid doing anything that might lead to war had become conventional wisdom among Iranian leaders and their Iraqi allies. When I interviewed Qais al-Khazali, the leader of Asaib Ahl al-Haq in September, he said confidently that “Trump will not go to war,” and that Iran knew how to keep any confrontation below the level of a full-scale military conflict. It may be true that Trump does not want war, but he is impulsive, ill-informed, and keen not to appear weak. He is surrounded by neo-conservative interventionists, equally ignorant, but instinctively aggressive. The result is that US policy in the Middle East is a chaotic compromise between different factions in Washington. The on/off US withdrawal from Syria last year was a typical consequence.
Iraqis have an acute sense of when danger is approaching. They were predicting last summer that a new crisis was on the way, even though the country was more peaceful than at any time since 2003. After Trump withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, they argued that Iraq was bound to be the arena for an Iran-US confrontation. Some friends in Baghdad were already making plans to buy a house or apartment in Turkey. Iraqis tend to take a pessimistic view of the political future thanks to forty years of crisis and war, but their forecasts rapidly turned out to be correct. They understood that any quarrel fought out in Iraq is necessarily confused, unpredictable, and unlikely to produce a decisive victory for either side because power in Iraq is so fragmented: Iraqis say that the four dominant authorities in the country are the government, religious hierarchy, the paramilitary forces, and the tribes. But even this is an over-simplification as Iraq is split between Shia, Sunni, and Kurds. The latter two communities will try to exploit any breakdown of relations between the US and the Shia to increase their own power. On the other hand, they will not want to be used by the US as pawns to exert leverage against Baghdad—and then abandoned, as they strongly expect they would be.
It does not take very much to destabilise Iraq and the signs are that Trump does not care if he does. Certainly, the consequences for Iraq of assassinating Soleimani does not seem to have bothered Trump. The US approach today is much like the mindless hubris shown by the Americans in Baghdad after the 2003 invasion, when they did not know what they were doing or care who they were offending.
Could the whole Shia coalition in the Middle East led by Iran, which Soleimani is credited with creating, now begin to unravel after his death? Iraq and Lebanon are clearly shaky, and in none of the Shia-controlled states has power been successfully institutionalised in a way acceptable to the entire population.
At the same time, it is a mistake to forget the strong sense of solidarity among Shia developed down the centuries because they were one of the most persecuted religious minorities in the Middle East, quite separate from Iranian influence. In the wake of the Soleimani assassination, they fear that once again they are being demonised and potentially targeted, as Donald Trump denounces all who oppose the US in the Middle East as Iranian proxies.
Yousif al-Khoei, the grandson of the Grand Ayatollah al-Khoei, told me that the confrontation between Iran and the US was already leading to “the rise of anti-Shia sentiment.” He receives many calls from non-political albeit very worried Shia who interpret Washington’s rhetoric as crude anti-Shia propaganda. “The threat to demolish ‘cultural sites’ in Iran was shocking to hear from a US president,” said Khoei. “Ordinary Shia express fear that this may mean attacking our holy places and institutions where faith and culture are intertwined.” One of the most significant developments in the Middle East since 1945 has been the rise of the previously marginalised and impoverished Shia communities in many—though not