US-Iranian Escalation Still Avoidable Despite Soldiers’ Deaths
2024-01-29258 view
The announcement that three American soldiers were killed in a drone strike near the Jordanian border with Syria on January 27 marks an important turning point in the long history of clashes between U.S. and Iranian-backed forces.
The drone strike hit either Jordanian territory (which Jordan has denied) or the American-occupied Al-Tanf military base in Syria’s Homs Governorate.
The common factor in Iranian-backed attacks on U.S. interests in the Middle East over the decades is Tehran’s long-held policy of plausible deniability, allowing it to distance itself from direct involvement in attacks carried out by its proxies.
The first example of this strategy was the double suicide truck bomb attack on American forces in Lebanon in 1983, which killed 241 U.S. personnel as well as dozens of French soldiers and six civilians, including the biggest single-day death toll for the United States Marine Corps since the Second World War. Iran and its nascent Lebanese proxy Hezbollah both disavowed the attack, despite evidence suggesting that they were involved.
A similar scenario was repeated in the Khobar attack in Saudi Arabia in 1995 - which the U.S. blamed on “Hezbollah al-Hejaz” - and other attacks in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The difference today is that the plausibility of Iran’s denials has worn thin. Tehran said it had no link to the January 27 attack. But the Iranian-backed Islamic Resistance in Iraq said it had targeted the al-Tanf base, and the deaths of American soldiers marked an increasingly direct Iranian challenge to the American presence in the region.
That said, the challenge may remain below the threshold that would lead to a direct, wider confrontation, especially as the approaching presidential election season will make the Biden administration reluctant to risk such an escalation.
Washington’s response is therefore likely to remain proportionate, and will most likely target the militias responsible for the attack, avoiding striking the Iranian Revolutionary Guards or official Iranian forces, a strategy that has not proven to deter Iran and its militias so far.
Some American military experts have urged the administration to carry out a decisive response against targets inside Iranian territory. However this remains unlikely, and could simply be electioneering, as Biden’s opponents seek to portray him as weak compared with his likely rival Donald Trump.
It appears that the administration’s rapid announcement of the incident, and particularly Biden’s public comments on it, were also partly intended to distract from domestic tensions stemming from a dispute between the state of Texas and the federal government. The Iranian government is probably aware of this, and may have factored this into their calculations over the attack.
After all, Tehran has an interest in avoiding embarrassing Biden to the point where he loses the White House to a Republican administration led by Trump, who ordered the assassination of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and would likely restore his policy of maximum pressure against Iran.
Therefore, Iran may have calculated that such an attack could benefit Biden by distracting from domestic issues and redirecting the American public’s focus towards external threats. Biden’s response may therefore be one that Iran could overlook or tolerate, providing it does not undermine its vital interests in the region. Biden may therefore respond by targeting militia leaders in Iraq, saving face without provoking a further escalation.
It is important to note however that the weakness of the Biden administration is clearly evident - not in his failure to deter to Iran and its proxies, but rather in his inability to end the madness of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war government.
Israel’s war on Gaza is dragging the U.S. back into the quagmire of the Middle East, marking the failure of the Biden administration’s policy of reduce its commitments to the region and focusing on its power struggle with China.
