Causalities of Tension and Incompetence.

Iran shot down a Ukrainian airliner over Tehran this week, after its retaliatory missile strikes on US facilities in Iraq.  The plane was carrying Iranians mostly bound for Canada, which has a large Iranian immigrant population.

To make this plane, Iran's military shot down a civilian aircraft over their own capitol city.

This is because the Iranian military isn't great.

Iran has universal male conscription at 18 years of age.  Interestingly, prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, it also conscripted women, but stopped at that time.  This means it has a large conscript military.

And while it has obtained arms, as the greed and stupidity of nations exceeds their best interests all too often, their military is basically a 1970s vintage force.

We don't know what happened to lead to this tragedy, but my guess is that a tired and scared group of Iranian conscripts had been harangued by officers and seniors about expecting an American attack to the point they were worn out and scared.  So they fired on what they thought was an American military aircraft and 176 completely innocent people, most of whom were their fellow countrymen. We don't know what happened to the men who fired the missile, but we can be assured that it is or was bad.

Nothing will happen to the men ultimately responsible for the tragedy, which is the Iranian Islamist leadership that has governed the country for forty one years and kept in on a violent path of regional Shiite dominance. That government will ultimately go down in an Iranian revolution of some sort, and much of their theocratic views forever with it.

Where this leaves the Iranian American Conflict is not known, but what has turned out to be the case is that an extremely risky course of action the US embarked on due to an order of President Trump and under the apparent urging of Mike Pompeo has been surprisingly effective so far.  Nearly everyone agrees that Gen. Soleimani was a terrorist whose demise should not be lamented.  That he was a uniformed officer of the Iranian paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, and the method by which it occurred really ramped up the risks, but Iran's response was ineffective, perhaps intentionally so, or perhaps simply because it was.  And Iran managed to put the period on the entire event by following up an ineffective missile strike by shooting down a Ukrainian airliner.  The U.S., in the meantime, has essentially declared the matter over.

Either as an example of truly masterful strategy, or by accident, the U.S. has effectively moved the bar on state sponsored terrorism and, due to the past week, managed to make state employed uniformed terrorist a routine target in wars on terrorism and to have exposed Iran's conventional forces as less than impressive.  Iran may have in fact suffered a set back as a sponsor of terrorism and given its history, that's a large part of its diplomatic approach to the world. Without it, it's not much.

At least not much until it acquires a nuclear weapon, which it is now working on.  Indeed, exposed as conventionally incompetent and now with a reduced military portfolio because of the changed nature of the game, it may be stepping back because it knows this has become a must for it.

Or so it probably believes. The irony of it is that nuclear weapons for small nations are, frankly, completely worthless.

Hubris and Hostilities. The Death of Gen. Qasem Soleimani

Gen. Qasem Soleimani was a bolt and brave man.

The aptly named USAF MQ-9 Reaper.

Which doesn't make him somebody we should admire. 

Nathan Bedford Forrest was a brave and bold man, but he served an evil cause and went on to found the Klu Klux Klan.

Nathan Bedford Forrest

Joachim Pieper was a bold and brave man.  But he was a nasty Nazi as well.  His special SS commandos were responsible for the Malmady massacre, for example, the 75th anniversary of which was just passed.

Joachim Peiper

And indeed, both men are good comparisons in some ways.  They were radicals for causes they believed in deeply, and they were willing to die for them. They had personal bravery, an attribute we widely admire, and applied it in the service of causes we deeply oppose.

Soleimani has been an instrumental figure in Iranian proxy wars all over the Middle East.  A person cannot feel sorry for his death and he died the way that people who live the way he lived die.  He who lives by the sword, as St. Matthew noted, die by it.

Islam of course was spread by the sword and for a very, very, long time its two principal Middle Easter branches have contested it other in manners in which swords were occasionally drawn.  Iran, for its part, has had no problem whatsoever about violently spreading its Shiia theocracy's point of view violently from day one.

And hence the irony.  Soleimani had been allowed to do what he did, mostly because the West tolerated. There are certain rules to war, even dirty wars and proxy wars, and one of them is that you don't assassinate the uniformed general officers of your opponent.

Not that doing such is an illegitimate act of war.  Soleimani was a solders.  Killing soldiers is legitimate.  We've been at war in Iraq now for 20 years, attempting to prop up a government we installed while Iran attempts to completely co-opt it.  Iran has no right, or at least not any more right than we do, to have proxy armies in Iraq. At least we have a relationship with the legitimate government.  So Soleimani flying into the Baghdad airport was based on the assumption that his Western opponents would abide by the unwritten rule of not targeting the general officers of an opponent even if Iran itself has widely ignored the laws of war.

Apparently the current administration has determined that it won't abide by that rule.

Which brings us to this.

Nobody should weep for Soleimani.  Probably even Soleimani wouldn't want people to do that.  And he received a fate which, through is life, he had advocated for.

But now what?

Clearly, we're on to some sort of new stage in the long slow struggle with Iran.  Iran hasn't played by the written rules and now we're not playing by the unwritten ones.  Iran will be obligated to retaliate somehow, but in asymmetric war, they're uniquely exposed as a large established state.  Their ability to act as a sponsor of terrorism and proxy militias depended upon the grace of their opponents, which now seems to have been removed.  It will try to act, not doubt, but in doing so, it can no longer be certain of anything.

Still, the question remains.  What on earth was Soleimani thinking in pulling into an airport in a country where you are maintaining an illegitimate military effort?