Killing Qasem Soleimani — the regional implications are stark

The US drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani last Friday morning would have been significant in any circumstances. But the killing beside him of al-Muhandis put the event in an even more dramatic light across the region. Lesser known than Soleimani, al-Muhandis was an Iraqi commander and senior government official. He was also an important Lebanese Hezbollah commander and the son-in-law of Imad Mughniyeh, who was killed in 2008 in a US-sponsored car bomb in Damascus. In the current climate, the attack will probably go down as one of the crucial events that turned the old order in the Middle East to something altogether more anarchic.

Iranian leaders speak loudly of exacting “revenge” for the attack, but they normally prefer to serve their revenge cold, and can be expected to take a while to plan a range of operations against the United States and its allies over the coming year — or longer. Tehran has a number of pressure-points it could explore: in Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, the waters of the Gulf, in cyberspace, through its diaspora groups in Western countries, in its antagonism with Saudi Arabia or through its newly-warmed relations with Russia and Turkey.

Whether or not they can make President Trump pay dearly for authorising Soleimani’s extra-judicial killing, Iranian leaders have no shortage of possibilities. They are restrained only by their willingness to trade blows with the US administration and what risks they will accept in playing brinkmanship with a highly volatile American president.

Their immediate and easiest opportunities will likely come in Iraq in the very near future.

With or without Iranian interference, Soleimani’s killing puts Iraq in a dangerous position. Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Mahdi was personally present at Soleimani’s Iraqi funeral on January 4, before the body was returned to Iran. The Prime Minister spoke then of this attack being “on Iraq itself”. These were stronger words even than those of the firebrand Moqtada al Sadr, or Ayatollah Sistani, both of whom immediately called “for calm” in the country’s response.

Meanwhile Iraq’s parliament has demanded the expulsion of US forces. In a practical sense, this will change less than might at first appear the case. Nato’s training mission to Iraqi forces has been suspended indefinitely and the counter-ISIS mission is at a standstill while US and western forces hunker down in their most protected base areas, which happen to be inside Iraqi military facilities.

All this makes it very unlikely that US and other allied assistance to the Baghdad government will carry on much longer. But the symbolism of a “Western pull-out” from Iraq will be enormous. Soleimani’s death polarises those (predominantly Shi’ite) Iraqis who loved him and those (overwhelmingly Sunni) Iraqis who hated him and rejoiced in his death.

It serves to emphasise the weakness of the Iraqi government in holding together a fragmented state, the determination of the Iraqi Kurds in the north not to be pulled down by a collapse in Baghdad, and the re-emergence of Islamic State sleeper cells in the territories formally carved out as the “caliphate”. Without tangible Western support, Iraq is in immediate and severe danger of falling again into a chaos all of its own.

Serious as this is, the immediate fate of Iraq is only one skid down a slippery slope into Middle East chaos that now begins to look inevitable. That previously gentle slope became considerably steeper once it was obvious to all leaders in the region that Trump simply had no coherent strategy for the Middle East. Between the generally consistent military policy of the Pentagon, the emasculated presence of the State Department, and the whims of the incumbent of the White House, it has become almost impossible for any of the Arab or partner nations, with the possible exception of Israel, to align themselves reliably with American policy.

Trump has staunchly backed Israel on highly controversial issues like Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the West Bank, but has been unable to unveil his vaunted “peace plan” for the Arab-Israeli conflict, and, in any case, is no longer trusted to act on it.

Meanwhile, US policy on Syria, Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf has flip-flopped from one month to the next: encouraging Saudi Arabia to blockade Qatar, then trying to heal the rift; supporting the UN-endorsed government in Libya then backing the warlord trying to overthrow it; pulling US troops out of northern Syria, then leaving most of them there when Turkey took the opportunity to invade Syrian Kurdish areas; threatening President Erdogan of Turkey for de-stabilising policies across the Levant, then feting him as a regional stabiliser; and so on and so on.

The US is obsessed with Iran, but it is still far from clear what end-game America is pursuing. Trump maintains that the Iranian leadership is close to collapse as a result of his “maximum pressure” economic tactics; but now he has switched to military tactics that will only strengthen the leadership he hopes to undermine. Some in the US administration speak openly of pushing for “regime change” in Tehran; others deny that is the end-game. In truth, nobody knows. Foreign ministries in the Middle East are in a permanent wait-and-see mode — not least for the US presidential election in November.

Everyone understands that Trump wants to get the US military out of the region and to turn away from the “forever wars” he blames on his predecessors. But he seems unprepared to accept that, in the Middle East, this entails surrendering all significant political influence over what happens next. The power vacuum in the region is increasing all the time.

Effective regional actors have not emerged as the reputation of the US has collapsed. Saudi Arabia has ambitions to fill the power vacuum in ways the Trump Administration would like, but it has shown military weakness and very poor political judgement in recent years. It has been sucked into a desperate war in Yemen, and is unable to lead the Gulf states effectively. The Kingdom has also been on the wrong end of most of the Iranian-Saudi tension across the region.

Turkey has big regional ambitions in the Middle East — not unnatural given its history and demography — but has lined itself up in a strange power constellation with Iran and Russia (and also with tiny Qatar). The result is that it is increasingly at odds with mainstream Western policy in South East Europe as well as in the Middle East.

This leaves Putin’s Russia with burgeoning opportunities, from the Black Sea, to the eastern Mediterranean, Cyprus, Syria, Libya and most recently in the Gulf. Putin can now make common cause with Iran and even China to try to show local actors that there are alternatives to living under predominantly US and Western influence.

But Russian involvement is not benign. In 2015, Russian intervention came in on the back of General Soleimani’s ground operations in Syria to save the Assad government. It did so by brutalising Aleppo from the air before ground troops moved in. Many chemical attacks against civilians took place. The same is now underway in the last opposition enclave of Idlib; and that was preceded by the deliberate, precision bombing of no fewer than 24 hospitals before the offensive began. That’s how Putin’s Russia operates when it gets involved in other people’s conflicts.

General Soleimani was a brutal leader as well as a charismatic one, and many across the Middle East will welcome his death. But the fact of his death will be more important, not for the anger it unleashes, rather than the flag it waves for the intensification of conflict.