Trump: U.S. ‘ready to embrace peace’
President backs away from more military conflict with Iran
WASHINGTON >> President Donald Trump backed away from further military action against Iran and called for renewed diplomacy Wednesday as the bristling confrontation of the past six days eased in the aftermath of an Iranian missile strike that seemed intended to save face rather than inflict casualties.
“Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world,” Trump said in a televised statement from the Grand Foyer of the White House, flanked by his vice president, cabinet secretaries and senior military officers in their uniforms. “The United States,” he added, “is ready to embrace peace with all who seek it.”
The president seemed as eager as the Iranians to find a way out of a conflict that threatened to spiral out of control into a new full-fledged war in the Middle East. While he excoriated Iran’s “campaign of terror, murder, mayhem” and defended his decision to order a drone strike killing the country’s top security commander, he dropped for now the bombastic threats of escalating force, vowing instead to increase economic sanctions while calling for new negotiations.
His statement came hours after Iran’s government indicated that it had “concluded proportionate measures” avenging the killing of the commander, Gen. Qassem
Soleimani, with the launch of ballistic missiles at two military bases in Iraq that house U.S. troops. The missiles harmed no Americans or Iraqis, a result interpreted by some analysts as a deliber
ate attempt by Iran to claim it had responded while not provoking Trump.
But analysts cautioned that even as the two sides edged away from a military clash in the short term, the conflict could very well play out in other ways in the weeks and months to come. Iran has many proxy groups in the Middle East that could stir up trouble for U.S. troops or U.S. allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia, and experts remained wary of a possible Iranian cyberstrike on domestic facilities.
President Hassan Rouhani of Iran made clear that his country still saw its mission over the long run as driving the United States out of the Middle East after the killing of Soleimani. “Our final answer to his assassination will be to kick all US forces out of the region,” Rouhani wrote on Twitter.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, likewise suggested Wednesday that an incremental operation would not be the end of the clash. “What matters is that the presence of America, which is a source of corruption in this region, should come to an end,” he said in a speech to a hall filled with imams and others, who chanted, “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!”
The operation against Soleimani may prove to have consequences beyond the direct relationship with Iran. Outraged that the general was killed after arriving at Baghdad International Airport, Iraq’s Parliament voted to expel the 5,000 U.S. troops from the country. Such a decision would still have to be enacted by the caretaker government, but the Pentagon has begun preparing for the possibility of losing its bases in the country nearly 17 years after the invasion ordered by President George W. Bush.
Lawmakers in both parties welcomed Trump’s decision to pull back from further military action, but Democrats expressed discontent with briefings provided Wednesday about the supposedly “imminent” threat of attack cited in justifying the drone strike on Soleimani. Several Republicans as well as Democrats said the presentations were unpersuasive and raised questions about why Trump had decided to take out the commander now.
Even though the threat of further conflict appeared to recede for now, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would vote Thursday on a measure curtailing Trump’s war-making power by requiring him to halt military action against Iran within 30 days unless Congress votes to approve it. Such a measure has little chance of becoming law, however, given Republican control of the Senate and Trump’s veto pen.
Trump’s 10-minute televised statement Wednesday was his most extended effort to explain last week’s drone strike on Soleimani. Aside from a four-minute statement Friday, he has stuck to Twitter blasts, comments to reporters and a call into Rush Limbaugh’s radio show without making an official speech outlining his thinking.
In his statement, Trump defended his decision to order the drone strike, calling Soleimani “the world’s top terrorist” responsible “for some of the absolutely worst atrocities” of recent years.
“In recent days, he was planning new attacks on American targets, but we stopped him,” Trump said without elaborating or offering evidence. “Soleimani’s hands were drenched in both American and Iranian blood. He should have been terminated long ago.”
But he emphasized that he did not want a wider war despite his efforts to build up U.S. combat capacity. “The fact that we have this great military and equipment, however, does not mean we have to use it,” Trump said. “We do not want to use it.”
While the president’s critics have traced the current conflict to his decision to withdraw from the nuclear agreement brokered by President Barack Obama and five other powers, Trump repeated his condemnation of that accord and urged Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China to recognize that it is effectively dead. He called on those countries to join him in negotiating a replacement for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that would go further to constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
“They must now break away from the remnants of the Iran deal, or JCPOA, and we must all work together toward making a deal with Iran that makes the world a safer and more peaceful place,” Trump said.
The call on Europeans to abandon the nuclear agreement may fall on deaf ears. Only a few hours before Trump spoke, European leaders repeated their commitment to the pact and urged Iran to return to compliance despite punishing U.S. sanctions. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, and Josep Borrell Fontelles, the foreign policy chief, both said the deal should be preserved.
Similarly, Trump in his statement called on NATO, an alliance he has regularly scorned, to take on a larger role in the Middle East, and he spoke by telephone with Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary-general, about the idea. But NATO allies have little interest in following Trump’s lead and in recent days have been withdrawing troops from Iraq to avoid becoming entangled in the conflict between the United States and Iran.
Soleimani, commander of the elite Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, was the architect of Iran’s efforts to extend its influence throughout the Middle East. He helped direct wars in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen as he sought to establish a regional bloc of Shiite power, and he was held responsible by the United States for attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq that killed at least 600 during the height of the Iraq War.
More recently, U.S. officials pointed to Soleimani as the force behind a Dec. 27 rocket attack on a base in Iraq that killed an American civilian contractor. They said he had traveled the region as part of preparations for a future attack that could have killed hundreds of Americans; they provided scant details and no evidence.