Avengers assemble

Iran retaliates for the killing of Qassem

Suleimani

Rocket-fire will probably not slake the thirst for revenge

against America

Middle East and Africa

Jan 8th, 2020
Editor’s note (January 8th, 2020): This article has been
updated since publication

“WE WILL TAKE revenge.” The words were those of Major-

General Hossein Salami, head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps (IRGC), speaking at the funeral of Qassem
Suleimani, the head of the IRGC’s elite Quds Force. The
sentiment has pervaded the rhetoric of virtually every Iranian
spokesman since General Suleimani’s assassination on
January 3rd. At his funeral on January 6th his daughter
warned that the families of American soldiers “will spend
their days waiting for the death of their children”.
In the early hours of January 8th Iran struck its first blows,
firing what it claimed were 22 ballistic missiles at two military
bases in Iraq that host sizeable numbers of American
troops—the Ain al-Asad base in western Iraq and another
facility in Erbil, in the north. Experts analysing early footage
said that some of the rockets appeared to be precision-
guided Fateh missiles, capable of carrying over 200kg of
explosives.

Despite the bloodcurdling rhetoric of recent days, Iran’s

foreign minister, Javad Zarif, seemed to play down the
prospect of further escalation, saying on Twitter that Iran had
“concluded proportionate measures in self-defence”. He
added: “We do not seek escalation or war, but will defend
ourselves against any aggression.” Iranian state television
said 80 “American terrorists” had been killed, but the
Pentagon and Iraqi officials said there were no indications of
casualties. President Donald Trump shrugged off the attacks.
“All is well!” he said in a tweet. “Assessment of casualties &
damages taking place now. So far, so good!”

This is unlikely to be the final word. Iran has a long history of

violence against its enemies, often stretching halfway around
the world—from Buenos Aires to Bangkok—to wreak
vengeance. And even though Iran unusually claimed
responsibility for the latest rocket attacks, it could revert to
its long-standing practice of acting behind the cloak of
secrecy, or at least of the militias it has sponsored around the
region. Its global reach has been enabled in part by a Shia
diaspora; there are large communities in South-East Asia,
south-eastern Europe and even Latin America.

In exacting further retribution, Iran’s challenge will be to

craft a response that befits the severity of its loss and the fury
of the ruling clerics, without provoking America, and its
mercurial president, into a spasm of such violence that it
endangers the survival of a regime beset by economic
sanctions and anti-government protests at home. And
beneath that calculation lies a game of nuclear brinkmanship
that has underpinned the crisis for years.

Iran has various means at its disposal: maritime disruption;

cyber warfare; attacks on America’s forces in the region or
on its Gulf allies and Israel; terrorism against civilians farther
afield; or even the assassination of a figure of comparable
stature to General Suleimani.

The naval option is limited. Iran has often threatened to close

the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil
exports must pass, if attacked. But Western military experts
think that any closure could be reversed in weeks, given the
weak state of Iran’s conventional military equipment.

In May 2019, in response to tightening American sanctions,

Iran embarked on an undeclared campaign of harassment
against international shipping. On January 7th America
warned merchant shipping that Iran might take aim at
American vessels. But it is now trickier for Iran to pull off such
attacks. Since September an American-led naval coalition of
seven countries—the International Maritime Security
Construct—has been guarding the strait; a French-led
European force will shortly begin its own patrols. Without the
need for deniability, Iran might simply hurl anti-ship cruise
missiles at American warships, but these can also be parried
through decoys and other countermeasures. Strategists have
speculated that Iran could use its fleet of 3,000 to 5,000
speedboats to mount swarming attacks on larger warships in
the confined waters of the Persian Gulf, though this concept
remains untested.

Cyber-attacks have proved effective in the past. “Incidents

involving Iran have been among the most sophisticated,
costly, and consequential attacks in the history of the
internet,” note Collin Anderson, a cybersecurity researcher,
and Karim Sadjadpour, an expert at the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, a think-tank, in a report published in
2018. In 2012 Iranian hackers succeeded in wiping out 30,000
computers of Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company.
Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity company, says that the
financial, defence, and oil-and-gas sectors are the most likely
targets of disruption. These could take the form of crude
denial-of-service attacks, in which servers are bombarded
with messages.
Yet Iran’s offensive cyber capabilities are probably of limited
use against America, says a former British official with
knowledge of the issue. “I don’t believe the Iranians have the
capability to penetrate US classified systems or industrial-
control systems and generally to cause them serious military
harm,” he says. Iran “will feel over-matched on cyber and
deeply vulnerable” to retaliation.

A little help from friends

Naval potshots and cyber-skirmishing may not fit Iran’s
present purposes. Brigadier-General Esmail Ghaani, General
Suleimani’s successor as head of the Quds Force, has said
Iran’s priority is nothing less than to “remove America’s
presence from the region”. On January 5th Iraq’s parliament
passed a non-binding resolution to expel foreign (ie,
American) forces. A day later, a letter from the American
military commander in Iraq, hastily withdrawn by the
Pentagon, suggested that Americans were preparing to
leave.
To try to push America out, Iran will look to its broad network
of friends and allies across the region. This would also
amount to a posthumous tribute: General Suleimani did
more than anyone to deepen Iran’s ties with militia and rebel
groups such as Hizbullah in Lebanon, Kataib Hizbullah in Iraq
and the Houthi movement in Yemen, all of which have been
battle-hardened in recent wars.

Though these groups do not blindly follow Iranian direction,

the relationship between them is now so deep that Iran’s
network has developed into a “sovereign capability to
conduct remote warfare and influence operations”,
concluded a detailed study published by the International
Institute for Strategic Studies, a think-tank, in November. “It
now tips the balance of effective force in the region in Iran’s
favour,” said the report.
In the past year Iran has used its regional networks to turn
up the heat on America and its allies. The Houthi movement
in Yemen has lobbed increasing numbers of Iranian-made
drones and missiles over ever-longer distances, sending
them smashing into Saudi airports and Emirati radars. Iraqi
militia groups have also increased their rocket fire against
bases hosting American troops; the attack which killed an
American contractor on December 27th, precipitating the
current crisis, was the 11th such bombardment in the
previous two months.

The missile attacks on January 8th are likely to presage a

period of more intense pressure on American troops. One
option would be to graduate from sporadic bombardment to
return to more sustained campaign of roadside bombs, as
happened in the early years of America’s occupation of Iraq,
or more spectacular assaults. In 1983 large suicide-bombs
struck American and French barracks in Lebanon. They killed
more than 300 people, including 241 American military
personnel. Though responsibility for the bombings are still
debated, American officials now believe that they were
conducted by the embryonic Hizbullah, with Iran’s support.
The suicide-bombings, then a novelty in the Middle East,
hastened the withdrawal of American and other
peacekeeping forces from Lebanon. Decades later, relentless
Hizbullah attacks also pushed the Israelis out of the country.

Iran has also been happy to blow up diplomats, intelligence

officers and even ordinary civilians to make a point. In 1992,
Hizbullah blew up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in
response to Israel’s assassination of the group’s leader,
Abbas Musawi, a month earlier. Two years later, it bombed a
Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires. In 2012 Hizbullah
was also blamed for a suicide-bombing of Israeli tourists in
Bulgaria and botched assaults on Israeli diplomats in places
as far afield as Thailand, India and Georgia. The attacks were
thought to be reprisals for the assassination of several
Iranian nuclear scientists in the preceding years, probably by
Israel.

On January 5th Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah’s leader, insisted

that his fighters would not go after civilians such as “traders,
journalists, engineers, and doctors”. They “cannot be
touched,” he insisted. This should be taken with a grain of
salt: hostage-taking was a favoured tactic in the 1980s. Iran-
backed groups captured journalists, preachers and aid
workers. The grisliest case involved William F. Buckley, the
CIA’s station chief in Beirut, who was kidnapped by Hizbullah
in 1984, tortured for 14 months and killed. America’s large
expatriate population of businesspeople in the Gulf offer
easy pickings.

Some former officials reckon that Iran has its sights on a

figure of equivalent stature to General Suleimani. “The
Iranians will probably feel it necessary to avenge the killing
of Suleimani by attempting to assassinate a similarly ranked
US official,” says Michael Morell, a former acting director of
the CIA who now hosts the Intelligence Matters podcast.
“They will do so at a place and time of their choosing, which
could be months from now.” Senior American military
officers, both in war zones like Afghanistan, where an
American general was shot and wounded in October 2018,
and peacetime bases, like those in the Gulf and Europe, are
likely to look nervously over their shoulder for the
foreseeable future.

Fissile brinkmanship
Mr Trump, warning against such reprisals, has promised
immediately to attack sites “important to Iran and the Iranian
culture”—52 of them, one for every hostage held by Iranian
radicals at the American embassy in Tehran in 1979. The
threat, from which the president later backtracked, implied
not only a war crime, but also an unprecedented American
bombardment of Iranian soil. And, though it is easy to dismiss
these as idle threats, Mr Trump proved himself willing to tear
up the rule book in slaying General Suleimani.

For all their bravado, Iranian leaders harbour genuine fears

over the consequences of a large-scale aerial attack. The
mass mobilisation in response to General Suleimani’s death
suggests that a strike on Iranian military forces might well
bolster popular support for the regime. But if America were
to strike at the leadership in Iran, or the country’s power and
energy infrastructure, serious political instability could yet
ensue.
All this will strengthen the appeal of a nuclear shield. On
January 5th Iran abandoned the last of several restrictions on
uranium enrichment that it had accepted under the 2015
nuclear deal negotiated with the American administration of
Barack Obama. Mr Trump repudiated it in May 2018, setting
the stage for the present crisis.
Though Iran has not formally left the pact, or booted out
international inspectors, it is signalling that it is willing once
more to expand its nuclear programme. This would gradually
shorten its “break-out time”—how long it takes to produce a
bomb’s worth of weapons-grade fissile material. Should Iran
reinstall centrifuges that it mothballed under the deal, add to
its stockpile of enriched uranium and refine it closer to
weapons-grade levels, its break-out time could shrink to
months or even weeks before the year was out. That would
force America and Israel back onto the horns of a dilemma
they faced during the 2010s: attack Iran pre-emptively and
risk setting the region ablaze, or accept the risk that the
regime might quickly produce a bomb.

Yet even a full-scale air campaign would not settle the

matter. A study published by former American diplomats and
military officers in 2012 concluded that air strikes on Iranian
nuclear sites could delay Iran’s programme by only four
years, and would probably increase Iranian motivation for
building a nuclear weapon in secret—in much the same way
that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq redoubled its clandestine nuclear
endeavours after the Israeli bombing of its reactor in 1981.
After America’s agony in Iraq, it is hard to imagine any
American president considering a ground invasion of Iran.
After all, Mr Trump was elected on the promise to get out of
the Middle East’s forever wars.

So, in a cycle of Iranian reprisal and American escalation, it is

far from clear who would have the upper hand in the nuclear
crisis that will surely follow.