Iraq riots
expose an America weaker and with fewer options
Mobbing of
US embassy after US strikes on state-sanctioned militia show America’s plan of
maximum pressure only added to chaos
Julian
Borger in Washington
Tue 31 Dec
2019 18.37 GMTLast modified on Wed 1 Jan 2020 00.35 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/31/iraq-riots-embassy-expose-america-weaker-fewer-options
Iraqi
supporters hurl stones at the US diplomatic mission in Baghdad on Tuesday, as
they rally in anger over weekend air strikes that killed pro-Iran fighters in
western Iraq.
The mobbing
of a US embassy has historically served as an emblem of America in decline, so
the scenes around the embattled mission in Baghdad are a fitting end to the
decade.
Tuesday’s
events are not quite as decisive as the 1975 helicopter evacuation of the
embassy in Saigon, or the seizure of the Tehran embassy four years later. Iraqi
forces did turn up eventually to protect the Baghdad mission. It turned out the
ambassador was on holiday anyway, so he did not have to endure the humiliation
of a rooftop escape. But the demonstration of US weakness, after spending $2tn
in Iraq, was plain for all to see.
The
rioters, organised by the Iranian proxy militia Kata’ib Hezbollah (KH), brushed
past Iraqi checkpoints, and there were members of parliament from the
government bloc among them. Security forces who have had no compunction about
firing tear gas canisters into the skulls of anti-Iranian protesters on Tahrir
Square, stood by and watched molotov cocktails thrown at the US embassy. In its
public pronouncements, the Iraqis put more blame on Washington than Tehran.
For Iran,
the embassy riot was the latest move in a deliberate strategy, to raise the
costs of the US presence in Iraq and drive a wedge between the Iraqi government
and Washington.
The
competition between the US and Iran for influence in Iraq would have escalated
anyway as the threat from Isis declined. But the US effort to destroy Iran
economically through its campaign of maximum pressure has meant the Iranians
have nothing to lose.
“The
Iranians have been very, very methodical over the past six months about their
responses to the maximum pressure campaign. And unfortunately, it is not really
met any counter-response,” said Barbara Leaf, former US ambassador to the
United Arab Emirates. “The question is: while Iran has a very methodical
approach to upping the ante, do they at some point trip across a red line that
they don’t even know exists?”
It was
inevitable that the repeated attacks by KH on Iraqi bases hosting US troops
would eventually lead to American casualties, as happened on Friday near
Kirkuk, triggering US retaliatory airstrikes on KH camps in Iraq as well as
Syria.
Ariane
Tabatabai, a political analyst at the Rand Corporation, said: “The US was sort
of stuck between a rock and a hard place, because on the one hand, if it did
not respond to this latest attack, considering that a US citizen was killed, it
would have sent a pretty strong signal that the red line that it had laid out
about US casualties didn’t mean anything.”
By
highlighting the Iraqi government’s impotence on its own territory, the
retaliation diverted public dissatisfaction with the heavy-handed Iranian
presence in Iraq, to the desire to be rid of the imperious Americans. The US
comes out of this tit-for-tat round weaker and with fewer options.
It is not
clear whether the US has a plan for what happens now. The campaign of maximum
pressure was supposed to force Iran to accept a worse deal than the 2015
multilateral nuclear agreement on which Donald Trump walked out in 2018. The
oil and banking embargo on Iran have been highly effective in damaging the
Iranian economy, but have failed to make Iran bow to US demands for Tehran to
give up its military stake in Middle East conflicts and its enrichment of
uranium.
Instead,
Iran has hit back against tanker traffic in the Persian Gulf, and Saudi oil
facilities, while ratcheting up pressure on the US military presence in Iraq.
US
officials have talked in recent days about “restoring deterrence” against such
moves with air strikes against KH targets, and have warned they are ready to
escalate by taking the fight into Iranian territory.
US
deterrence however is undermined by having given Iran so little to lose, and by
the vacillation of the president, who is entering an election year claiming he
has extricated the country from costly foreign wars, while simultaneously
wanting to appear tough in the standoff with Iran.
“To those
many millions of people in Iraq who want freedom and who don’t want to be
dominated and controlled by Iran, this is your time!” Trump tweeted on Tuesday,
but he sent the tweet while on his way to his golf course in Palm Beach.
He was
convinced that maximum pressure would bring Iran to the negotiating table as a
supplicant, but instead it has added to the chaos.
No one –
almost certainly not even Trump – knows how he is going to respond
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário