The first deomino in US-Iran relations toppled in 1953 with the overthrow of the Iranian governmnet, engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency and an another important domino toppled in 1983 with the Iranian-inspired attack on the US barracks by a suicide-driver plowed an explosive-laden truck that resulted in 241 Marine casualties — the largest Marine Corps loss of life since the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945 when the Corps suffered more than 25,000 casualties. The next domino fell with the Iranian takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran when 52 US embassy officials and civilian workers were taken hostage for more than a year (November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981) before the hostages were released. The next domino fell with the revelation in 2002 that Iran was seeking to build nuclear armaments. Another important domino toppled with US wirthdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the "Iran nuclear deal" or the "Iran deal", on May 8, 2018. So, The LK (Lyin' King) toppled that domino and toppled another with the US drone-attack-killing of General Quassem Seleimani on January 3, 2020. To date, the head of state in Iran, Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei, proclaimed that Iran would seek further revenge on the US for the attack on General Seleimani, And The LK sits in the Oval Office in ignorance of all of the toppled dominos because of his dyslexic inability to read the briefing books prepared by US intelligence agencies. If this is a (fair & balanced) prediction of likely disaster, so be it.
[x The New Yorker]
Consequences — Donald Trump’s Iran Problem
By Robin Wright
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
On September 19, 1983, during Lebanon’s long civil war, the Reagan Administration ordered Marine peacekeepers in Beirut to open fire on Muslim militias in the mountains overlooking the city. The marines had been deployed for more than a year, after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, to help hold together one of the world’s most fractured states. Colonel Tim Geraghty, their commander, warned that an attack would cost the United States its neutrality and its mission; nevertheless, US ships fired more than three hundred rounds of seventy-pound shells. Geraghty later wrote, “As the sun set at the end of a tumultuous day, I remarked to members of my staff that my gut instinct tells me the Corps is going to pay in blood for this decision.”
On October 23rd, a suicide bomber drove a truck loaded with twelve thousand pounds of explosives into the peacekeepers’ barracks. Two hundred and forty-one Americans died. The largest loss for the Corps in a single incident since Iwo Jima was carried out by a Lebanese group that became Hezbollah—but it was orchestrated by Iran. Washington ordered US warplanes to destroy an Iranian military post in Lebanon, but called off the strike. The marines moved to underground containers; a few months later, they sailed home, their mission abandoned. “The Iranians’ goal was to remove the marines and Western influence,” Geraghty recalled last week. “And they did.”
The United States proved in 1983 that it had a tactical advantage, but Iran proved that it had a more wide-ranging strategy—as it has demonstrated repeatedly through the years. The next four U.S. Presidents avoided a military showdown with the Islamic Republic, even as its strategic advance across the region deepened. The risks and the potential complications were deemed too great. President Trump has said that he, too, has no desire for war, yet he started the new year with a drone strike that killed General Qassem Suleimani, the mastermind of Iran’s expeditionary Quds Force, while he was on a trip to Baghdad. Trump tweeted that Suleimani “has killed or badly wounded thousands of Americans over an extended period of time, and was plotting to kill many more.” Amid debate in Washington about the intelligence used to justify the strike, Trump said that Suleimani had planned to bomb four US embassies, but the Administration presented little evidence to support the claim.
Trump’s decision has already had sweeping consequences—for the regional military balance, the campaign against isis and Al Qaeda, Iran’s nuclear program, and the unnerving political dysfunction in the Middle East. The Iraqi parliament, infuriated that Washington had violated the country’s sovereignty, voted to expel five thousand US troops. Seventeen years after the US invasion, the presence of American troops is suddenly precarious; so is the fractured government of Iraq, after months of protests demanding its ouster. The US-led campaign against ISIS—which still has fourteen thousand fighters in Iraq and Syria—was suspended. The Pentagon disavowed a leaked letter that outlined the “repositioning” of US troops. But, on Friday, Baghdad asked Washington for a road map for withdrawal.
The Trump Administration’s top two goals in Iran have also been undermined. For decades, successive Presidents have sought to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon. By 2013, the regime was within weeks of being able to build a bomb—the so-called breakout time. In 2015, the Obama Administration, along with five other major powers, brokered the Iran nuclear deal, which limits aspects of Tehran’s program for up to a quarter of a century, and permanently insures international inspections. The breakout time was stretched to more than a year. But, on January 5th, two days after the killing of Suleimani, Iran said that it would no longer limit the number of centrifuges for enriching uranium. The nuclear deal, which Trump abandoned in May, 2018, on the ground that he wanted something broader, is now unravelling. Iran’s breakout time has begun to tick down again.
For two years, the Trump Administration has also exerted “maximum pressure,” through sanctions and isolation, to force new concessions from Tehran. It boasted of its success in November, when protests against Iran’s deteriorating economy and bad governance erupted across the country; the regime killed hundreds of people, and injured and jailed thousands more. But the assassination of Suleimani reignited nationalism in Iran; millions of people turned out to mourn the General’s death and to rally around the theocracy. Last Tuesday, Tehran retaliated by firing more than a dozen missiles at two military bases used by US forces in Iraq. No one was killed in the attack, and Washington and Tehran both signalled that they wanted to avoid escalation, but the prospects for diplomacy grew more distant. (In an unintended consequence, Iran also appears to have shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane taking off from Tehran, killing the hundred and seventy-six people on board.)
Iran’s goals remain what they were in 1983. “Military action like this is not sufficient,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, said of the missile strikes. “What is important is ending the corrupting presence of America in the region.” And Tehran is much more capable today. It has evolved into the world’s leading practitioner of “gray zone” activities—covert and unacknowledged military operations, proxy attacks and cyberwar—Michael Eisenstadt, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said last week. “The United States has struggled to respond effectively to this asymmetric way of war.”
Iran also has time and geography on its side. “We are historic interlopers. We come and we go,” Robert Malley, the president of the International Crisis Group, said. “The notion that we could sustain our forces in a multifront, multiyear, unpredictable struggle in the Middle East—given the politics in this country, and the fact that most Americans don’t think this is of vital interest—is illusory.” On Thursday, the House of Representatives voted 224 to 194, largely along party lines, to limit the President’s powers to make war on Iran. A similar resolution is expected in the Senate. Neither would be binding, but both reflect anxiety in Washington about the consequences of further hostilities.
The Islamic Republic marks its forty-first anniversary next month. Historically, Washington has been able to inflict greater pain, but Tehran has shown a greater capacity to absorb it. The United States has figured out how to react to a militia or to kill a commander, but it still hasn’t figured out how, creatively or proactively, to deal with the nation of Iran. ###
[Robin Wright is a contributing writer for The New Yorker (online) and has written for the magazine since 1988. Her first piece on Iran won the National Magazine Award for best reporting. A former correspondent for the Washington Post, CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, and the Sunday Times of London, she has reported from more than a hundred and forty countries. She is currently a joint fellow at the US Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She has also been a fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as well as at Yale, Duke, Dartmouth, and the University of California at Santa Barbara. Wright's most recent book book, Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World (2011, 2012), was selected as the best book on international affairs by the Overseas Press Club. See her other books here. Wright received both a BA and an MA (history) from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; she was the first woman appointed as the sports editor of The Michigan Daily as well.]
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