"This decade’s war will have no ground rules."
"This decade’s war will have no ground rules."
The year 2020 and the decade of 2020s began with an undeclared war launched by Donald Trump against Iran and its militia allies in the Middle East.
The trigger was the assassination by an American drone strike of Iran’s top commander, Qassem Suleimani, and a ranking Iraqi militia general, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, of Kata’ib Hezbollah, early Friday morning (Jan. 3, 2020) in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, some 2 kms from its airport.
Suleimani was a senior Iran government official. That makes his killing illegal. The murder was done in another country. That violated the sovereignty of Iraq.
Trump’s advisers claimed Suleimani was planning an “imminent” attack, probably against US diplomats and US facilities in the Middle East. Trump said he stopped, not started a war. Suleimani had killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, said the US President.
Indeed, according to the New Yorker, since the late 1990s, Suleimani “was engaged in trying to remake the Middle East to Iran’s advantage, directing his proxies to kill or dispatch anyone who impeded his vision of an Iranian-dominated sphere of influence stretching from Tehran to the Mediterranean Sea. He was remarkably successful, legendary even—certainly the most influential operative in the region in modern times. He was involved in sponsoring terrorist attacks, propping up despots like Bashar al-Assad in Syria, helping to assassinate at least one foreign leader—the Prime Minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri—and killing hundreds of American soldiers along the way. In the latter years of the American war in Iraq, Suleimani’s militias deployed a particularly bloody weapon against U.S. soldiers—the ‘explosively formed penetrator,’ or E.F.P.—which tore through the armor of U.S. military vehicles and wreaked havoc on soldiers and marines. It was no small irony that he died on the road to the Baghdad International Airport, where so many Americans soldiers and Iraqis died by ambush.”
Also, said the New Yorker article, “he was not just the central figure in the country’s foreign policy and military; he was also considered a pillar of the Revolution itself. Since 1979, Iran has regarded its defense against foreign enemies, particularly the United States, as central to its survival. Suleimani’s vision of the region was formed in the1990s, during the Iran-Iraq War, which left more than a million people dead and for which the Iranians, not entirely without reason, blamed the U.S. and its allies. Suleimani, a veteran of that war, vowed that nothing like it would happen to Iran again, and he built the Quds Force—a wing of the Revolutionary Guard—into a small, mobile army capable of waging asymmetric warfare against the country’s enemies, including the US.”
Was that enough justification for Trump to order Suleimaini’s extrajudicial killing? Trump’s predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama did not think so, although the Iranian general was an easy target because of his prominence and very public appearances.
The first world war began in August 1914, triggered by the assassination of the Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand and his wife, on 28th June 1914 by Bosnian revolutionary, Gavrilo Princip.
Unlike the First and Second World Wars, this decade’s War will not be infantry and naval battles. The new war’s dimension is unprecedented and could include terrorism, cyberattacks, hostage taking, car bombings, more assassinations, and attacks on facilities, including nuclear, oil, and commercial shipping, of the warring participants. There will be no ground rules. Civilians, including women and children as well as politicians, could routinely be collateral damage. It could drag known US allies like Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, and even perhaps Japan and the Philippines.
Unlike North Vietnam and Iraq, Iran is a different enemy state. It seems to have prepared for war with America since the 1979 Iranian Revolution that ousted the US-backed Shah. The Americans gave asylum to the Shah which triggered the hostage-taking of 52 US diplomats that lasted for 444 days and abbreviated the Carter presidency.
Until Obama entered into the 2015 agreement with Iran to limit, for five years, its nuclear production below the level of bomb-making, Tehran was on the way to becoming a nuclear power.
On Saturday, Iran said it will no longer comply with the limits. Its Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei also told his advisers retaliation against the US must be direct, proportional and done openly. That means the Revolutionary Guards, and not proxy militias in the region, will do the engagement.
So far, the Americans are in suspense just when and where the attacks will be. The Iranians, it seems, are in no hurry, preferring to let the Americans, in the meantime, stew themselves in the calumny of a cowardly assassination and the rage it has unleashed in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Iraq has given signals to the US to begin pulling out (“repositioning” is the American word) its troops or at least limit their activities to something short of loitering. America is understood to have as many as 60,000 troops in the Middle East. Those troops are now on war footing. The US-led coalition in Iraq and Syria has also paused its fight against the ISIS to focus on a bigger enemy, Iran and its militias in the region.
For the Philippines, the war could have dire consequences. Some four million Filipinos are in the Middle East. In January-October 2019, Filipino expats in Iraq remitted $259,000; Iran $409,000; UAE $1.36 billion, and Saudi Arabia $1.78 billion. President Duterte has asked for billions of budget to prepare for the possible evacuation of Filipino expats in Iran (1,600) and Iraq (6,000).
Another problem is oil, whose price could spike to $90 a barrel, from the present below $70, if the crisis worsens. At the Strait of Hormuz, thru which passes 30 percent of the world’s oil supplies and of which 80 percent goes to Asia, Iran could disrupt their shipments. So far, the crude price has remained steady.
In yesterday’s briefing to the Tuesday Club, Bangko Sentral Governor Benjamin Diokno advised cynics and doomsayers: “There is no need to panic.”