Читать книгу War In The Age of Trump - Patrick Cockburn - Страница 9
ОглавлениеAt the time of his assassination, General Qasem Soleimani’s strategy in Iraq and in other Middle Eastern countries with large Shia populations, had become counterproductive. He is now guaranteed the status of an Iranian and Shia warrior-martyr, in spite of the mistakes he made in the last years of his life, the effects of which may, to some extent, have been reversed by President Donald Trump’s decision to kill him. Beginning last October in Iraq, Soleimani orchestrated the violent repression of small-scale protests about social and economic grievances, which turned them into something close to a mass uprising by the Shia community. Iran and its proxies were blamed for the death of more than 500 protesters and injuries to 15,000 others; demonstrators chanting anti-Iranian slogans burned the Iranian consulates in the Shia holy cities of Karbala and Najaf. Later the same month in Lebanon, vast crowds filled the streets of Beirut, demanding an end to a political status quo that Hezbollah, Iran’s local ally, had fought for decades to create. In Iran itself, the government ruthlessly suppressed November protests over fuel price rises; according to Amnesty International 304 people were killed. At home and abroad, the Shia coalition, which Iran had built up with immense effort since the 1979 revolution, was falling apart; the Iranian state and its two most powerful regional allies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Hashd al-Shaabi, or Popular Mobilisation Forces, in Iraq, were losing their legitimacy as defenders of their communities and the opponents of foreign interference in their countries.
The Iranian leadership faced a political crisis long before President Trump ordered the assassination by American drone of Soleimani at Baghdad airport on 3 January. Trump ignored the old military saying “Never interrupt your enemy when he is in the middle of making a mistake,” at a time when Soleimani, and those who thought like him in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, had made a grave misjudgment in choosing violent repression to deal with opponents of the political status quo. As the largest crowds since the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 filled the streets of Tehran and other cities to mourn Soleimani, senior members of the Iranian government appeared astonished by a renewed sense of national solidarity. Demands by demonstrators that the government stop wasting money on foreign adventures, like those organised by Soleimani, were replaced with cries for vengeance against the US. Since he withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, the purpose of Trump’s Iran policy and, crucially, the imposition of sanctions has been to ramp up popular pressure on the Iranian leadership, forcing them to give in to US demands if they want to stay in power. There was strong evidence that this approach was working until the Soleimani killing revived support for the government in Tehran.
But Trump is not the only leader who makes unforced errors. Just when the Iranian government was riding a wave of re-awakened nationalism, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard unit near Tehran airport shot down a Ukrainian passenger aircraft, killing all 176 passengers, including eighty-two Iranians and sixty-three Canadians. The Revolutionary Guards lied about their responsibility for the incident for three days until finally admitting that the crew manning the anti-aircraft missile battery had mistaken the civilian plane for a US cruise missile. Within hours, demonstrators were back in the streets of Tehran and other cities. But this time they were shouting anti-government slogans, demanding the punishment of the Revolutionary Guard commanders, and blaming the regime for everything that had gone wrong. Student protesters chanted: “Guards, you are our dictator. You are our Isis,” while others called for the resignation of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and an end to forty years of clerical rule. Iranians noted that their military had taken great care not to kill any Americans in retaliation for the death of Soleimani when they fired ballistic missiles on 8 January at US bases at Erbil and Ain al-Assad in Iraq. They asked why their generals did not pay equal attention to keeping their own people alive. Iran is a deeply polarised country of eighty-two million people, and though not all of them will have felt that way, the popular mood swiftly changed; a week that began with the government basking in new-found popularity ended with it being denounced for its incompetence, mendacity, and brutality. These feelings of outrage and contempt were expressed in an angry joke on Iranian social media: “The Revolutionary Guards have sent a message to the US that, if you attack us once again, we will level Iran to the ground.”
In Iraq, the effect of the assassination is less straightforward: protesters involved in the last round of demonstrations are not likely to shed tears for a man who has spent the last three months trying to kill them, and yet, perversely, his death does undermine the protests. The Iraqi political elite, that had begun to look as if it might buckle under popular pressure, can now claim that it is defending Iraqi independence, and that the greatest threat to Iraqi sovereignty comes from the US, and not Iran. Iraqi leaders sympathetic to the protesters will be more cautious: President Barham Salih, for instance, had rejected two interim prime minister nominees (to replace the discredited Adel Abdul-Mahdi) for being too close to the pro-Iranian camp. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, whose support or tolerance is essential for any Shia-dominated government in Baghdad, was backing fresh elections. These moves may continue, but in a less major key: “no Iraqi leader,” said one Iraqi commentator, “will want to open himself up to accusations of being too pro-American.” Already there are signs that Mahdi may stay on as prime minister. From the start of the protests, pro-Iranian paramilitary groups have claimed that the movement was a plot by the US, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia to stage a “velvet revolution” to overthrow the government. These conspiracy theories will be pushed harder and repression will intensify: On 5 January protesters in the southern city of Nasiriyah, who were refusing to take part in funerary rites for Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the Kata’ib Hezbollah leader who was killed alongside Soleimani, were shot at and their tents set ablaze.
Since Soleimani’s death, Trump and his cabinet have been demonising him as the terrorist mastermind responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers. On the contrary, in Iran and in Shia communities across the world, he has been presented as the supreme national and religious martyr who died for his country and his faith. The two narratives combine into a somewhat exaggerated picture of Soleimani’s significance. They distort the image of his twin-track role as the head of Quds Force, the foreign branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, carrying out covert operations and open diplomacy in parts of the Middle East with significant Shia populations: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Afghanistan, and the Gulf states. He certainly would have given the orders for the drone and missile attack on Saudi oil facilities at Abqaiq and al-Khurais last September, but he was also a highly visible regional politician. He manoeuvred and acted as an intermediary between different national, ethnic, and religious leaders. Iraqi Prime Minister Mahdi says that Soleimani had flown into Baghdad International Airport to discuss measures to reduce hostility between Iran and Saudi Arabia: “I was supposed to meet him in the morning the day he was killed; he came to deliver a message from Iran in response to the message we had delivered from the Saudis to Iran.” Trump, who wants to portray Soleimani as a monster, denies this, but it is highly likely that what Mahdi says is true.
The US has always been keen to hide the degree to which it has been Iran’s de facto partner, as well as its rival, in Iraq ever since Saddam Hussein (effectively allied to the US during the Iran-Iraq War) invaded 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 all—of the region’s countries; above all Lebanon and Iraq, the latter becoming the first Shia-ruled state in the Arab world since Saladin overthrew the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt in 1171.
Yet American and British politicians too often treat the rise of the Shia as purely the outcome of unjustifiable Iranian interference. Western leaders find it convenient to adopt the anti-Shia propaganda line pumped out by Sunni states like Saudi Arabia, which persecutes its own Shia minority, and Bahrain, which has an even more oppressed Shia majority. In both countries, Shia who demand civil rights are punished as terrorists and alleged Iranian proxies. Often, the Sunni authorities are convinced by their own propaganda: when the Bahraini government, backed by Saudi troops, crushed the Arab Spring protests on the island in 2011, Shia doctors in a nearby hospital were tortured to make them admit that they were receiving orders from Iran. A high-level international investigation, however, found no evidence of Iranian involvement in the protests. Bahraini officials even became convinced that a sophisticated piece of medical equipment in the hospital, used for monitoring heart conditions, was a high-powered radio used for keeping in touch with Tehran.
After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, American and British military commanders were paranoid about alleged Iranian plots to foster resistance to the occupation. In fact, it needed no fostering, because neither Shia nor Sunni wanted Iraq to be occupied by a foreign military force. Old propaganda claims have resurfaced over the last week about Iran assisting the predominantly Saudi 9/11 bombers, or being the driving force behind the largely Sunni resistance to the occupation.
Such self-serving conspiracy theories, whether they are being peddled in Washington, London, Riyadh, or Abu Dhabi, are counterproductive. They foster a sense of Shia solidarity that is to the benefit of Iran. We saw this over the last week in Iran, as anti-government protests in 2019 were replaced this year by crowds numbering millions, jamming the streets of Iranian cities to mourn that very same government’s top military commander. At the time of writing, the pendulum has swung the other way again, thanks to the dysfunctional and authoritarian nature of the Iranian government that led to the shooting down of the Ukrainian plane and the abortive cover-up.
One advantage for Trump in Soleimani’s assassination is that the Iranians are likely to be more cautious in launching limited attacks on the US and its allies. But this does not mean they will discontinue entirely. Iran does not have many cards in its hand and sees this guerrilla-type campaign as one of them. It is unlikely to de-escalate without some relaxation of sanctions, which are strangling its economy. At the same time, Trump and his administration are peculiarly ill-equipped to judge the likely outcome of any new phase of the conflict, or predict how the Iranians will respond. This makes blundering into war a prospect more likely than usual, though neither side wants it.
