{UAH} A CRITICAL ANALYSIS ON THE PUTTING DOWN OF QASSEM SOLEIMANI

Attack on Qassem Soleimani was deterrence, not escalation

By John Podhoretz

January 3, 2020 | 5:01pm

Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani Abaca via ZUMA Press

To all those terrified by the prospect of the Iranian response to the killing of Iran’s terror master, Qassem Soleimani, consider the horrors visited upon the United States after these events:

• The Seal Team Six killing of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2010.
• The killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in October 2019.

Hmmm. No horrors, actually. Those killings seem to have hollowed out the heart of those monstrous organizations.

Well, surely there are even worse examples that have been visited upon Israel due to its aggressive military acts. Let’s take a look:

• Israel destroyed an aborning nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981 and one in Syria in 2007.
• Israel targeted and killed father-and-son Hezbollah commanders, the Mughniyahs, in 2008 and 2015, as well as Hamas No. 2 Ahmed al-Jabari in 2012.

In all these cases, the organizations and governments struck by Israel vowed hellish revenge. But while hostilities persisted, the hellish specific revenge that was promised — even guaranteed — never came.

Why?

For peaceable people, the idea that the use of force is sometimes the only possible counter to the use of force can be hard to take. If a cycle is begun by acts of destruction, how can addressing it through other acts of destruction be anything but … destructive?

The answer is that all acts of destruction are not equal.

Those who destroy first do so because they are not peaceable — or rather, they do not see peace as the most desirous condition.

They might pursue conflict instead because the application of friction is one way to change a status quo that they do not feel is favorable to them.

They might act belligerently because the ruination or humiliation of one’s enemies can be a way to achieve honor among their peers and generate fear among their foes — and achieving such honor and generating such fear are classic pursuits in a culture more inherently martial than ours.

The pursuit of ruthless self-interest and glory are features of human nature from Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel onward, and they must be taken into account when someone or some group or some nation comes under attack.

For various reasons, including its belief that economic sanctions imposed by the Trump administration were hostile acts in themselves, Iran began attacking the United States and the world order it helps to uphold this year.

It began with glancing assaults on third parties in the late spring before shooting down an American drone in June and then graduating to actual missile strikes on American positions inside Iraq in December.

After the destruction of the drone, the Trump administration was minutes away from a military response when the president suddenly called it off. Trump’s forbearance was of a piece with his oft-stated and deep desire to avoid military confrontations in the Middle East.

The Iranians grew bolder and more challenging after Trump chose not to strike back.

Trump did not want to engage. The problem was, Iran did.

The mullahcracy in Iran, supported by Soleimani’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, seeks to expand its influence in the region through the use of force. It believes in force. It sees glory in the use of force. And it sees no difference between conventional battlefield exchanges, ginned-up demonstrations at the US embassy in Baghdad or terrorist strikes.

For such an adversary that does not view peace as the ultimate goal, the calculus is simple: They test and prod and dare and in so doing seek to exhaust and debilitate their foe.

The way to stop it is not “peace.” It is, rather, deterrence.

President Donald Trump delivers remarks on the strike that killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani.AP

The attacked foe — in this case, the United States — must raise the cost of doing business to the point that it seems worse to continue on the same path than it is to relent.

By striking and killing Iran’s most resourceful and clever military thinker and leader, America did exactly that.

Iran’s retaliation may be awful. But without question, if Soleimani had been left unmolested, his and Iran’s actions would have been awful as well — perhaps far more awful than we can ever know.

And the history of decisive actions against irredentist actors in the Middle East I sketched above suggests Iran knows it faces a choice it didn’t think it faced before. It can vow hellish revenge, but now it has had a taste of the hell the United States can rain down in response.

And while the mullahs are extreme, they do not appear to be imprudent.

Ruthless self-interest might have gotten them going in the first place, and it is what might restrain them in the end. That is how deterrence works. And that is the bet Trump and the United States made by letting the Iranians know we were not going to take their aggression lying down.

EM         -> { Trump for 2020 }

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