By Seth J. Frantzman
Tuesday, January 22, 2020
In the wake of the U.S. killing of General Qasem
Soleimani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran is scrambling
to figure out how to respond to President Trump. Throughout 2019, Iran
ratcheted up threats and tensions, targeting oil tankers in the Gulf, Saudi
Arabia, and U.S. troops in Iraq via proxies, testing Washington’s response. The
decision to kill Soleimani, who arrived at Baghdad International Airport
without any apparent suspicion of his impending death, threw down a gauntlet to
Tehran that left the Ayatollah and the IRGC grasping for response options. This
is a lesson to be learned from the recent Iran tensions: The U.S. can strike
back at Iran and its allies without a major war resulting, so long as Iran is
surprised or confused by the U.S. response.
Iran, in response, fired ballistic missiles at two U.S.
bases in Iraq because it didn’t know what else to do. Ballistic missiles
enabled Iran to strike without risking its own casualties and to showcase a
technology that it has and that the U.S. lacked defenses against in Iraq. But
the strike was limited in scope, and Iran hoped that at worst the U.S. would
respond with cruise missiles or some similar kind of missile strike. How do we
know this? Iran didn’t put its whole country on a war footing when it fired the
missiles. It did down a civilian Ukrainian Airlines flight by mistake, showing
that it expected some kind of aerial retaliation.
Iran tries to project an image of itself as massively
powerful and cunning, sending its constantly smiling foreign minister, Javad
Zarif, abroad to demonstrate its ability to open doors from Europe to Asia.
Closer to home, Iran pushes relations with Turkey, Qatar, India, Oman, and
other countries. Iran boasts of massive revenge for its losses. All last year,
Iranian media featured articles about its military technological achievements,
such as new drones, missiles, and warships. But behind the facade of strength
and boasting, Iran prefers long-term incremental achievements and influence
entrenchment in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon.
Take the Iranian proxy attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq
throughout 2019 as an example. Iran can read U.S. media and official statements
to gauge U.S. response. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo flew to Iraq in May to
warn of possible Iranian escalation. From that moment Iran did escalate,
attacking oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman and downing a U.S. drone in June. In
Iraq, rockets were fired at bases where U.S. forces are located. Pompeo warned
in December that “Iran’s proxies have recently conducted several attacks” in
Iraq and that the U.S. would respond directly if Iran harmed U.S. personnel.
David Schenker, State Department assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs,
said that Iranian-backed militias in Iraq were shelling Iraqi bases where U.S.
forces are located.
Iran didn’t expect the U.S. to carry through with a
powerful response because it could read U.S. responses to the June drone
downing and knew that Trump had refrained from a strike on Iran. Whether by
mistake or intention, a rocket attack by Iranian-backed Kataib Hezbollah in
late December killed a U.S. contractor near Kirkuk. Five Kataib Hezbollah sites
were hit with U.S. airstrikes in response, and dozens were killed. Iran
predicted that a show of force at the U.S. embassy would embarrass Washington
and show the U.S. who is boss in Iraq. On Twitter on December 31, Pompeo
singled out Kataib Hezbollah leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, Iran, and other
Iraqi proxies of Iran as responsible for the attack on the U.S. embassy.
Tehran’s leaders could have read that tweet as the threat that it was. Instead,
Muhandis met Soleimani at the airport in Baghdad two days later, without fear
that he was being followed by a U.S. drone that would soon turn his SUV into a
smoldering wreck.
The decision to go off script and strike directly at
Soleimani and Muhandis has been termed “regime disruption,” a purposeful
attempt to confuse Tehran by doing something unprecedented. Iran’s initial
reaction was muted despite is boasts of “hard revenge,” because it doesn’t know
what to do. It wants to keep an open account with the U.S., as a threat to do
more. But Tehran’s usual attempt to control the tempo of conflict in the Middle
East has been blunted.
Lesson learned: Iran does best when it gets to set the
narrative through its good-cop/bad-cop strategy of military bluster and
political sweet talk, played by Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and Iran’s proxies
in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon. But what does Iran do when it faces complex
challenges? In Syria, Israel has carried out more than 1,000 airstrikes on
Iranian targets, and Iran has responded with desultory rocket fire. The attacks
appear to have reached a point where Iran expects them and shrugs them off,
because, as with Soleimani, it doesn’t know how to respond to Israel. It has
provided Hezbollah with a massive arsenal of rockets and wants to equip them
with precision guidance, but Tehran must know that you get to use this massive
arsenal only once before you provoke a war with Israel. That means that
Hezbollah has one shot and that Iran must preserve that threat for a rainy day.
Where Iran succeeds in its incrementalism is in the Gulf
and in dealings with Europe over the Iran deal. Iran has walked away from key
aspects of the deal over the past year, giving Europe 60-day warnings. Iran did
the same in the Gulf, judging that Saudi Arabia would not respond to a drone
and cruise-missile attack in September against its Abaiq refinery. Typically,
when 25 drones and nine cruise missiles strike a massive refinery, the country
would go to war in response. But Iran knows that Saudi Arabia can’t afford a
real war that would destabilize the Gulf and oil exports. Riyadh and its
wealthy Gulf neighbors have more to lose than Iran does in such a scenario.
Iran expects its adversaries to follow a script, and it
has a ready-made tit-for-tat response. The U.S. left the Iran deal and struck
Soleimani and Muhandis, surprising Tehran. Killing another IRGC commander would
have diminishing returns, just as sanctions seem to no longer surprise Tehran.
This is a challenge for American strategists: Devise a strategy whose core is
to do the opposite of what the enemy expects. A combination of Seinfeld’s
George and Sun Tzu’s Art of War. The more Iran has to focus on what the U.S.
might do next, the less Iran can plan on how to attack the U.S. and its allies,
including Israel.
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