dr_doze had a good and cogent response to this so I won't repeat a lot of what he wrote.
If you were exceptionally bored and looked through my posting history the last 10 years, I have always held that Iran's leaders are rational, and I have always favored containment and deterrence over invasion or even direct bombing campaigns within their borders.
My unease with withdrawal from the nuclear deal, as I touched on earlier in this thread, has more to do with the way a lot of international agreements aka treaties skip the Senate ratification stage, which leads to president-to-president volatility of those agreements, which weakens the negotiating strength of the United States in the long term. But taken in a vacuum, I think it was a bad deal and would have preferred crushing economic sanctions starting at that time.
Khamenei has repeatedly said that nuclear weapons are an affront to Islam, and that Iran is not seeking to develop and possess them. Of course we know this is a lie.
My only disappointment in the Soleimani attack is that we didn't get the guy in Yemen at the same time.
Bottom line, while I don't really like the phrase "Trump Derangement Syndrome" I can't help but think that the Democrats' and media's reaction to the events of the last few months are influenced by it. Again, whacking Soleimani wasn't a random whimsical event out of nowhere, or some kind of unilateral aggression and escalation. Iran has been progressively escalating their attacks for months. You know the list; I won't repeat it here. Trump has responded with extraordinary restraint.
We were told repeatedly during the 2016 election, by the campaign of the strong, firm, hawkish Clinton, that Trump was a loose cannon that would kick off WWIII. The reality is that one of the few areas of consistency he has displayed in the last 3 years is reluctance to initiate military action. Perhaps even to a fault. The right has been very critical of his restraint. He was excoriated by the right wing press and twittersphere when he called off the retaliation for our drone being shot down in international airspace. And again when he didn't empty the silos after Saudi Arabia was attacked.
What do you want me to say? An operation that I wholeheartedly approve of went well, and the geopolitical result appears to be an overwhelmingly positive one.
I don't know where you get the idea that Soleimani was wildly popular in Iran. He and his Quds did a lot of brutal work keeping Iranians in line over the years, to put it mildly. Part of the tragedy of the dead mourners is that many of them were likely compelled to be there. And with regard to him being the Persian Tom Hanks, it's obvious to any casual observer that his role will be played by Sean Connery in the movie.
Who here is saying that killing Soleimani was a random whimsical event out of nowhere and was unilateral? For I think the third time now, I am telling you that reporting about the matter states that the Pentagon offered the Soleimani option as an extreme one to make moderate ones seem more palatable. We can engage in preemption without overescalating by killing wildly popular, high-level officials. Our current situation is not analogous to dr_doze's mention of Israel and Saddam's nuclear reactor. If there is a reactor in late-stage development, that is a totally different beast.
----------
They didn’t think he would take it. In the wars waged since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Pentagon officials have often offered improbable options to presidents to make other possibilities appear more palatable.
After initially rejecting the Soleimani option on Dec. 28 and authorizing airstrikes on an Iranian-backed Shiite militia group instead, a few days later Trump watched, fuming, as television reports showed Iranian-backed attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, according to Defense Department and administration officials.
By late Thursday, the president had gone for the extreme option. Top Pentagon officials were stunned.
Top US national security officials continue to defend the Trump administration's claim that it killed Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani in response to an impending threat to American lives, but the lack of evidence provided to lawmakers and the public has fueled lingering skepticism...
edition.cnn.com
While senior officials argue the drone strike was warranted to prevent future attacks, some in the administration remain skeptical about the rationale for the attack.
www.nytimes.com
----------
Regardless of what you think, the Pentagon didn't think it was proportional and thus it was an escalation. Furthermore, it seems we are really the only ones saying that the Soleimani killing was in response to the embassy attack anyway.
Trump now seems to be selling some bs about how imminent future attacks were really the reason, and his own Senators are calling him out about how no intelligence regarding a credible new threat against the Baghdad embassy or other embassies have been shown to them.
As for Trump's restraint, I don't argue that there is an undercurrent of anti-hawkishness, although my opinion is that it's totally by chance or related to some other corruption. I guess you don't care about the reasons why, but the fact that he has drawn down military presence at times does not gel with the fact that the guy filled his cabinet with generals, had Bolton as part of his cabinet in the first place, or that he's now fallen in love with the AUMF and thinks the War Powers Resolution is bogus. Further,
let's all hope that whatever the reason was for the Soleimani killing, it wasn't this.
In regard to Soleimani's popularity, I called him Persian Tom Hanks because of Tom Hanks' popularity, not the likeness. The WSJ writes:
----------
Gen. Soleimani was widely popular among Iranians as Tehran’s regional power grew in the face of international pressure, and the man credited with defending Iran from Islamic State and other terrorist groups. Staying largely above the political fray, Gen. Soleimani was believed to be Iran’s most popular official, far more revered than the country’s moderate President Hassan Rouhani, according to recent polls by researchers at the University of Maryland.
Before his death, Gen. Soleimani was called a “living martyr of the revolution” by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Following the news of the U.S. strike, Mr. Khamenei declared three days of national mourning for the commander’s death and warned that “hard revenge awaits criminals.”
Iran watchers say such state-led adulation fed the nationalistic fervor needed to support the Guards’ military forays in foreign countries.
Qassem Soleimani, the architect of Iran’s shadow wars and military expansion in the Middle East that brought the Islamic Republic to the brink of conflict with the U.S., has been killed. He was 62.
www.wsj.com
---------
The UoM study the WSJ references where Soleimani enjoyed an 82% popularity rate:
------
"Gallagher said many Iranians lost trust in the United States after pulling out of the nuclear deal and viewed Soleimani as their protector.
"He consistently polls better than anybody else in terms of overall favorability,” Gallagher said. “We saw when people are feeling under threat, then there'd be a little spike in his popularity.""
The survey interviewed thousands of Iranians and found 82 percent of them viewed the general favorably.
www.wusa9.com
-------
I think you'll agree that describing Soleimani as a wildly popular, high-level government official is not an exaggeration, especially after seeing the stampedes after his death and the itchy trigger fingers on those Russian SAMs. Killing popular, high-level government officials is usually an overescalation with significant repercussions, and I hope we don't subject ourselves to near-miss cognitive bias vis a vis risk decisions just because we seem to have gotten away with it this time.
www.strategypage.com
