Tensions between US, Iran escalate
Pentagon chief warns Tehran may strike again
WASHINGTON – Ominous statements from Washington and Tehran on Thursday highlighted the quandary President Donald Trump faces in confronting an increasingly aggressive Iran, even though Iran-backed protesters pulled back from their attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
The tensions were underscored when Defense Secretary Mike Esper warned that Iran might be planning additional military strikes on U.S. targets, just hours after a top Iranian military commander boasted that Tehran was “not worried” about the U.S.
“We have the power to break them several times over and are not worried,” Revolutionary Guards Commander Brigadier General Hossein Salami said, according to Tasnim, a government-affiliated news outlet. “We are not leading the country to war, but we are not afraid of any war.”
Trump and his top advisers have repeatedly touted their “maximum pressure” policy, a sanctions-driven campaign to isolate Iran diplomatically and cripple it economically.
But the clashes demonstrate that Iran has its own strategy, one that has proven remarkably effective. Iran’s leaders, and its proxy forces in places like Iraq, remain willing and able to lash out at the U.S. – causing spikes in global oil prices, undermining Ameri
can allies and threatening U.S. assets abroad.
“They’re showing our impotence,” said Barbara Slavin, director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council, a foreign policy think tank in Washington. “This is maximum resistance to maximum pressure.”
The embassy protest erupted Tuesday, two days after U.S. airstrikes hit Iranian-backed militia targets in Iraq and killed more than 25 people. The airstrikes were retaliation, U.S. officials said, for an Iranian-sponsored attack on an Iraqi base that killed an American civilian contractor and wounded American servicemen.
Slavin and others said the U.S. response was counterproductive and demonstrates the dilemma Trump faces as he walks a tightrope between a war he doesn’t want and capitulation his supporters would abhor.
Iran’s attack on the base may have been designed to goad the U.S. into striking inside Iraq, according to an analysis by Abbas Kadhim, an expert on Iraq who is also with the Atlantic Council. “Tehran got exactly what it wanted,” he posted Wednesday.
Now, he noted, Iraqi political leaders are condemning the U.S. reprisal, and some are even calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from that strategic country. Meanwhile, Iran is likely searching for yet another way to strike the U.S., as Esper hinted on Thursday.
“In the dangerous stalemate between the US and Iran ... the US has to expect that Iran will react to any action by choosing another battlefield where the balance of power is more favorable,” Gerard Araud, a former French ambassador to the U.S. and Israel, tweeted Wednesday. “We saw it in the Gulf, we are seeing it in Iraq.”
The embassy attack in Baghdad – a confrontational move that prompted Trump to send hundreds of additional U.S. troops to the region – immediately captured Washington’s attention and revived memories of the 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. That standoff lasted 444 days and helped doom President Jimmy Carter’s bid for reelection. As in 1979, the protesters in Baghdad this week shouted “Death to America” and smashed their way into the diplomatic compound, setting fire to a reception area as combat helicopters flew over the complex.
This week’s tit-for-tat aggressions in Iraq are part of a broader campaign dating to Trump’s decision to withdraw in 2018 from the Iran nuclear deal, a multilateral agreement aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Trump blasted it as weak. The U.S. has since imposed massive sanctions in an effort to force Tehran to negotiate a new deal. Trump’s advisers have demanded that Iran end its ballistic missile program and stop funding proxy forces in the region.
None of that has worked. Instead, according to U.S. officials, Iran sabotaged oil tankers in the Persian Gulf in May, downed a U.S. drone in June and struck Saudi oil facilities in September.
“The Iranians have not stopped trying to extend their influence in the region. The Iranians have not come back on bended knee to accept a new nuclear negotiation with more Iranian concessions,” said Robert Ford, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria and Algeria.
“The Iranians didn’t even agree to met Trump in New York last September,” said Ford, now a senior fellow at Yale University and the Middle East Institute in Washington.
Ford said the Trump administration’s “maximalist position” may be viewed within Iran as an indication that the U.S. is more interested in regime change than compromise, he said. “It looks to me like Tehran is hoping that in a year, Donald Trump will be gone.”
Slavin said Trump has few palatable options to solve the standoff.
“We’ve already sanctioned Iran up to the eyeballs,” she said. “We can kill some of their proxies here or there. But the next level is to attack Iran itself, and if we do that, then it’s off to the races. We have another Middle East war – one that the U.S. doesn’t want to fight” and that could result in another failed state, just like Iraq after the U.S. ousted Saddam Hussein.