Iran Escalation Persists

Setting aside the memes about World War 3 and US military draft hoaxes that have trended on social media the past few weeks, the escalating tension between the United States and Iran is anything but a joke. 

When President Trump withdrew from the Iranian nuclear deal in 2018, which the Obama administration and their European allies brokered to ease sanctions on Iran in exchange for limiting their nuclear program, tensions immediately escalated. Trump then launched his “maximum pressure” campaign by reimposing devastating economic sanctions, which one research fellow at Sciences Po, called a “self-fulfilling prophecy” that has further destabilized the region. 

When known Iranian war hawk, John Bolton, came in as US National Security advisor in 2018, the idea of targeting Iranian leadership intensified because of Bolton’s push for regime change in Tehran. 

Since then, the risk of conflict between the US and Iran has increased significantly, such as seeing Iran lash out by downing a US military drone in June of 2019, being responsible for attacking Saudi Arabia’s largest oil facility three months later, and launching more than a dozen separate rocket attacks on bases housing Americans since October. According to the Department of Defense, since May 2019, the US has deployed 14,000 additional troops to the region to protect our own interests and that of our Iraqi and Saudi allies. 

On Dec. 27, a US civilian contractor was killed and four US service members were wounded in a rocket attack on an Iraqi base where a US-led coalition was preparing a counter-ISIS operation. Two days later, pro-Iranian protesters further escalated tensions by attacking the US embassy in Baghdad. Both incursions were allegedly orchestrated by Soleimani.  

On Jan. 3, President Trump gave the go-ahead to assassinate top Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani, where nine others were killed in the drone strike near the Baghdad International Airport. He was at his Florida golf course when he gave the order. It has been reported by NBC News that the President decided to take out the general seven months earlier, on the condition that he could be implicated in the death of an American. 

Soleimani was a Major General of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and commander of its Quds Force that has ties to several armed forces in surrounding countries. He and his forces have been linked to multiple attacks and deaths of US military personnel since the Bush administration. According to USIP, it is also true that Soleimani and his forces have been at the helm of fighting ISIS for years in Syria and Iraq. It has recently been revealed that on the same day as Soleimani’s assassination, the US military also attempted to kill another high-ranking Iranian commander in Yemen, but ultimately failed.

This conflict has come under scrutiny from the press, the public and most members of Congress. To many people, assassinating the top general of a sovereign nation is a clear act of war, which according to the Constitution, is supposed to be authorized by Congress. In order to act in accordance with the law, the Trump administration cited that Soleimani was an imminent threat to the United States, but that claim has been largely rebuked. 

Not only did the Trump administration not properly notify Congress, but the President also lied on national television about four US embassies being targeted, which was disputed by his own Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper. To justify the attack, Vice President Pence made an unfounded claim by suggesting General Soleimani had ties to several of the 9/11 hijackers. These fabrications led the Washington Post to state, “The result is a credibility crisis for an administration that has long struggled to communicate factual information to the public.”

Although most presidents in the past have seen a bump in approval ratings after a high profile military operation, polls like the recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll, show that the majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of Iran, while a USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll shows that most Americans feel ‘less safe’ after the killing of the Iranian general. 

Reports from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, Business Insider, and more have also called into question the motivations of the military strike while President Trump faces impeachment and his reelection year. As a famous projector of his own thoughts and behaviors, it cannot be ignored that Trump has claimed several times in the past that President Obama would start a war with Iran in order to be reelected. It has also been reported by the Wall Street Journal that the President told associates he carried out the attack in order to curry favor with GOP senators before the Senate impeachment trial. 

Although the assassination of Soleimani may have appeased some Republican congressmen, it did the opposite with others like Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who railed against the endless wars in the Middle East and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who called the closed-door briefing on Iran the worst intelligence briefing in his nine years in the Senate. Sen. Lee signed on to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ bill to prevent funding for military intervention in Iran.

Iran responded to the killing of their general by launching missiles at an Iraqi air base, which houses US military personnel. Fortunately, there were no casualties and the prospects of war have died down since then. 

In the wake of the Iranian missile attacks, a Ukrainian civilian airliner was accidentally shot out of the sky, which killed all 176 passengers and crew members, many of whom were Iranian and Canadian. Iran’s foreign minister said it was a result of “human error at time of crisis caused by US adventurism.” Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau seemed to agree when he stated, “if there was no escalation recently in the region, those Canadians would be right now home with their families.” 

Since that tragic night, the Trump administration has escalated their maximum pressure campaign by adding more sanctions and refusing to remove troops from the region. This came after the Iraqi parliament unanimously voted for the US to leave their country and a Department of Defense memo was drafted and mistakenly distributed that indicated the US would comply with Iraq’s request to pull out troops from the country. 

President Trump has threatened to bomb Iranian cultural sites, there are more American troops in the region than there were at the end of Obama’s term, the rate of drone strikes are up, and massive civilian protests in Iran have erupted. This series of events has made it harder to stop the endless wars in the region that Trump vowed to end during his 2016 presidential campaign.

Cover photo: The White House on Flickr Labeled for Reuse