National Review Online
Wednesday, January 08, 2020
World War III is off.
The killing of Qasem Soleimani stoked a round of hysteria
in the media over the consequences, with serious people on cable TV invoking
August 1914.
The formal Iranian military retaliation makes all this
look even sillier than it already seemed. The Iranians hit two bases in Iraq in
a missile strike carefully calibrated to limit the damage, and indeed, there
were no U.S. casualties. Tehran clearly wanted to be able to say it had
directly struck at the Americans, while limiting the risk of further
confrontation with the U.S.
This suggests that Trump won the first round of this
stage of the contest with Iran. He took a key enemy player off the board in
Qasem Soleimani and affirmed a red line against killing Americans. In
announcing new sanctions against Iran in a White House address, he also made it
clear that Iran isn’t escaping from the stringent sanctions box that it is
desperate to get out of (hence its series of provocations the past few months).
Yet, Iran obviously still has cards to play. Biding its
time, it could launch retaliatory assassinations and terror attacks in the
months ahead. Our position in Iraq is precarious, with the Iraqi parliament
taking a symbolic vote to expel foreign forces and Iranian proxies still a
threat (there are fresh reports of a rocket attack in Baghdad’s Green Zone).
Iran, meanwhile, is ramping up its nuclear activities.
There are more flash-points ahead, but for now, the
killing of Soleimani looks less like a turning point than another incident in a
long confrontation with the Iranian regime.
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