ArgumentIran’s Revenge Plans Are Bigger Than Missile Strikes
The consequences of the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, several U.S. intelligence officials say privately, will be clear: more deaths, and some of them American. Zach Dorfman writes that Iran’s noisy Tuesday attacks were only the beginning. Suleimani understood that, unlike Russia or China, Iran was not, and would never be, powerful enough to challenge the United States head-on. Suleimani instead developed a network of proxies which showed that a state could forgo traditional means of power projection and nevertheless powerfully assert its suzerainty outside its own borders. Those same tools will now be brought to bear by Iran on enacting vengeance for Suleimani—in the Middle East and beyond.
The killing of Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, perhaps the second most powerful person in Iran behind Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, will reverberate in the Middle East and beyond for years, and perhaps decades. Zach Dorfman writes in Foreign Policy that the immediate consequences, several U.S. intelligence officials say privately, will be clear: more deaths, and some of them American.
Dorfman writes:
Tuesday’s noisy attacks, despite the reassuring words of the Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif that they were a “proportionate measure,” were only the beginning.
Those killings will be carried out using tools Suleimani, who was assassinated in Iraq by a U.S. drone strike, himself built. The institution Suleimani led, the Quds Force—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ powerful hybrid military intelligence agency and covert action wing—midwifed Shiite extremist groups in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Suleimani understood that, unlike Russia or China, Iran was not, and would never be, powerful enough to challenge the United States head-on. It would have to prepare for war differently. This meant establishing deterrence (in Iran’s thinking) against a U.S. attack through asymmetric means, by supporting proxy forces such as Lebanese Hezbollah, the world’s most formidable terrorist army. It also meant backing spectacular acts of violence that did not rise to the level of, and would not precipitate, full-scale war.
The effectiveness of Suleimani and Iran’s larger program of terrorist assassinations, roadside bombs known as improvised explosive devices (responsible for the deaths of over 600 U.S. soldiers), and the bombing of apartment buildings, Jewish community centers, tourist buses, and diplomatic facilities by Iran’s proxies showed that a state could forgo traditional means of power projection and nevertheless powerfully assert its suzerainty outside its own borders.
Dorfman writes that those same tools will now be brought to bear by Iran on enacting vengeance for Suleimani—and not just in the region itself.
