Front Burner - U.S. killing of top Iranian general stokes worries over wider conflict

Episode Date: January 6, 2020

In the days since the Trump administration ordered a lethal drone strike in Baghdad on Iran’s second-most powerful man, Qassem Soleimani, Iranian officials have promised “vigorous vengeance” against the U.S. and chants of “death to America” were heard in the Iranian parliament. On Sunday, as anti-war protests broke out across the United States, a funeral for Soleimani brought thousands of mourners to the streets in the Iranian city of Ahvaz. Today on Front Burner, as tensions ratchet up, we talk with national security expert Heather Hurlburt about what could happen next.

This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. So that's the sound of Iranian parliament chanting, death to America. So that's the sound of Iranian parliament chanting, death to America. In the days since the Trump administration ordered a lethal drone strike in Baghdad on Iran's second most powerful man, Qasem Soleimani, Iranian officials have promised, quote,

vigorous vengeance against the United States. On Sunday, a funeral for Soleimani brought thousands of mourners to the streets in the Iranian city of Avaaz. Meanwhile, anti-war protests broke out across the U.S. Inspired by fears of World War III and Donald Trump's threat that the U.S. now has 52 Iranian targets ready in the event of retaliation against America. So what happens now? Heather Hurlburt is with the New America U.S. think tank. She's a national security expert who held senior positions in the White House and State Department under President Bill

Clinton. Heather's with me now from Washington to explain how we got here and how this could all play out. This is Frontburner. Hi, Heather. Thank you so much for being with me today. Hi, Jamie. Thank you so much for being with me today. Hi, Jamie. Thank you for having me. So I'm hoping we can just get caught up here. I want to talk about how we got to this assassination last week. So briefly, what immediate events led to the U.S. attack that killed Qasem Soleimani? So there's been a spiral of military tensions between the U.S. and Iran for several years now as the Trump administration took the U.S. out of the multilateral nuclear deal with Iran, told Iran it needed to do more, not just to curb its nuclear weapons program, but also to wind down its habit of using its

own military and proxy forces to gain influence in the region. It exports dangerous missiles, and proxy forces to gain influence in the region. It exports dangerous missiles, fuels conflicts across the Middle East, and supports terrorist proxies and militias such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban. And stepped up what the U.S. calls a maximum pressure campaign of economic sanctions. The Iranians retaliated against that by what had been a string of relatively small scale military attacks, both on tankers from US and allied countries in the Persian Gulf. And for the last few months by sending rocket attacks onto bases in both Iraq and Syria, where there were U.S. soldiers serving.

And that had been going on on a fairly, as I say, low level. There'd been nine or 11 of them. Right after Christmas, there was another one of those attacks, which actually did kill an American. A contractor, right? Yes, right. Not a service member, but an American citizen who was present. And in response to that, Washington seems to have decided that it was time to send a much stronger signal that basically every time you hit us, we will hit you harder.

So in response to that, the U.S. attacks a number of Iranian bases or places where Iranian affiliated militias are headquartered both in Iraq and Syria. And those attacks kill something like 25 members of these militias who are not necessarily Iranians, but they are affiliated with Iran. Iran denounces its American aggression, it called it American terrorism, against what it called Iraqi forces on Iraqi soil. In retaliation for that, one of these militias occupies the outer courtyard of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad last week. Defense Secretary Mark Esper telling us,

You know, enough is enough. We have all the capabilities inherent in the United States military to either respond to further attacks or to take preemptive action if additional attacks are being prepared. What we think we know based on anonymous reporting is that then the military goes to the president who's on vacation in one of his properties in Florida and says, here's a list of options of things the U.S. can do in response to the attack on the embassy. And one of the items on the list is assassinate the number two security official in Iran. And the president says, let's do

that one. Okay. And did that surprise people? According to the reporting, it did surprise the people who put the option forward. And we should say that going back several administrations, Qasem Soleimani, people have discussed assassinating him because he is perceived, he was perceived to be both so powerful within Iran and also the mastermind of so much of the regional terrorism and proxy warfare that Iran had carried out. Before we move on, can you tell me a little bit more about him? You know, I've heard him be referred to as like the U.S. vice president, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and director of the CIA, all rolled into one.

Is that fair? I think that might be a little bit of an exaggeration. But, you know, he serves in Iran's armed forces starting in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, which is an incredibly deadly and long conflict. And his mindset is totally formed by that. And then he goes from that into this military intelligence organization. And he accrues an enormous amount of power within that organization, gets the trust of Iran's senior leader, who's a religious figure, Ayatollah Khamenei,

not a political figure. Iran also has an elected president who is in a civilian government, which is less powerful. And one of the things that this reflects and why it's so hard to come up with a parallel for him is the extent to which elements of both the state and the economy in Iran have been taken over by these revolutionary guards who are kind of a paramilitary force that the elected organs of the state can't really rein in. So he does have this power in a category that that's not quite translatable in a democracy. You mentioned before that this guy has been on the radar of previous administrations. So why make this decision to kill him now?

You know, why wasn't he killed before? Previous administrations, both Republican and Democratic, have judged that, number one, the potential for blowback for killing him would be too large. And number two, that because he's not a guerrilla leader, he's part of a state, he's part of a government structure. So you'd be removing one person, but you wouldn't be removing the structure. You know, if you kill, say, the, the head of US armed forces or Canadian armed forces, that's a terrible tragedy. But our armed forces are structured so that there'd be another person in the job doing the thing the next day. So that was the that was the calculation before. What about the argument that this guy has played just a really significant role, though, in like Iran's goals for expansion in the region,

these proxy wars in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Yemen. Anytime Iran attacked oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and then denied it, or attacked oil facilities in Saudi Arabia and denied that too, U.S. officials saw Soleimani's handiwork. Well, you know, there's this hope, I think, that he was a personally irreplaceable figure and that Iran won't be able to conduct the successful level of really proxy war diplomacy, I'll call it, that he did. But we're about to find out whether that's true or not. And something, frankly, that quite often happens when we identify a figure like this and we say, well, this guy has the blood of so many people on his

hands and he's been so successful, the world will be a better place if we take him out, that they're then replaced by someone who may be less sophisticated, but who may be even more brutal. So you may, because one of the things about Soleimani that's really interesting is that over the years he had been in communication with senior American military officials. There had been some not exactly partnership, but mutual understanding, both with respect to fighting ISIS and with respect to fighting al-Qaeda. So it has often been thought better the devil you know than what comes after the devil you know. Obviously, this administration made a different calculation. Okay. The Trump administration says that he was plotting an attack on Americans and that this threat was imminent.

But we caught him in the act and terminated him. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was making the talk show rounds this weekend. The senior leaders who had access to all of the intelligence, there was no skepticism.

I think General Milley used the term, we would have been culpably negligent had we not taken this strike. Are we seeing any evidence of that? What about that argument for taking him out? What we've seen so far is, as you say, assertions from the administration that attacks were imminent, although you've had sort of conflicting comments coming out of the Pentagon about whether the attacks were imminent or not. You've also had unnamed sources from the U.S. Congress

who've been briefed who said nothing we saw suggested that an attack was imminent and that basically the evidence that was presented to them was Soleimani is traveling around a lot. Soleimani is visiting countries where Iran has proxy forces that can do significant harm to American service members and American interests. And then finally, that Soleimani was traveling back to Tehran, supposedly, the administration says to seek authorization for a really big operation against the US. But skeptics say Tehran was his home base. He traveled there all the time. There's nothing unusual about it. So this idea that something was imminent in the way that the law normally defines imminent is really contested.

Some critics of President Trump and the United States are saying that we can't look at this without looking at what's happening with his impeachment right now. What do you make of that argument? Do you think that's fair? You know, I saw a wonderful comment on this from someone who'd been a longtime intelligence professional who said, we never discuss politics in targeting, but it's always in the room the U.S. have been escalating over years. In recent months, Iran has been dealing with civilian protests and crippling U.S. sanctions. Gas prices are going up about 50 percent. Security forces apparently firing on protesters from a rooftop. How is this assassination playing in Iran? You know, how do you think it could affect the stability of the regime? So in the last day, you've seen massive crowds turn out to memorialize Soleimani.

Including in parts of the country that have been noted for being restive and less friendly to the regime. So in the short term, you can debate how much of a boost, but in the short term, it gives the regime some pro-regime energy that it had not been able to generate on its own for some period of time. In the long term, the activities of the Revolutionary Guards are not hugely popular with everyone inside Iran Iran because they're perceived as taking money, taking resources away from Iranian consumers. You know, if you're spending money to buy missiles to use in Syria and Lebanon, you're not spending that money to import food and medication for people at home. Oh, interesting. And I would imagine that those frustrations grow as conditions worsen for people on the ground in Iran. So that has been the bet of the Trump administration, that it could tighten the

pressure on Iran so greatly that the regime would either choose to stop spending money or lessen the amount of money it spends on proxy warfare. Or, frankly, the hope, the explicit hope of many in the Trump administration is that the regime would be overthrown. OK. Now, we haven't, we've seen a lot of unrest. We haven't seen anything that suggests the regime is anywhere near that fragile. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection.

Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. I want to talk to you about what could happen next here. I know you obviously don't have a crystal ball, and the Middle East is incredibly unpredictable, but a lot of people seem incredibly anxious about what happens now. World War III was trending on Twitter over the weekend. Iran has been clear that there will be reprisals. Warning that they may target 300 American-affiliated sites for potential military response.

And what could that look like? So it's not likely to look right away like what you think of when you see the hashtag World War III, right? Iran also doesn't want to get into a straight-on shooting war with the U.S. because it would lose in a straight-on shooting war. I mean, things that we know will happen and that are happening already, there'll be huge pressure on the U.S. to pull back its troop presence in Iraq, which will make it harder for the U.S. to combat ISIS, which will make it harder to keep ISIS out of the spaces that it's been pushed out of over the last couple of years. So that's a consequence that isn't going to look like

Iran in the short term, but is a negative consequence if you think ISIS is a separate problem. And this just in, the Pentagon announced that the U.S. has paused its efforts in the fight against ISIS due to a need to protect U.S. troops in the region. You may see U.S. troops leaving Iraq entirely. There was a parliamentary vote in Iraq calling on the U.S. to leave. Now that vote's not binding and Sunni and Kurdish lawmakers boycotted it. So Iraq is terribly divided. The U.S. will have less freedom of maneuver there. The other thing that you'll certainly see is more attacks on U.S. soldiers, U.S. diplomats. There was another rocket attack on Baghdad's green zone today. The high security zone houses foreign embassies and government buildings. The U.S. military says two members

of the Department of Defense were wounded. And very possibly and worryingly for all of us, U.S. and other Western civilians traveling abroad, I think that's an absolute certainty. Right before we spoke on Sunday, Iranian state TV announced it would no longer abide by any limits of its 2015 nuclear deal. The government said it would no longer limit its enrichment of uranium. And what does that mean? That sounds like a big deal, but is it? So Iran has been ratcheting up its rhetoric in the past few months, and it has been slowly nibbling away at little small corners of the deal while threatening to hang on through 2020 and see if U.S. elections would bring a president who would be interested in getting back into the Iran deal. What's minimally certain is that the price for getting back into a nuclear deal will now be much

higher. And certainly, depending on how the debates within Iran go, you could see much more aggressive moves toward a program that, if Iran chooses to go full speed ahead on it, is less than a decade away from having a fully functioning nuclear weapon. Okay. And you also hear a lot of people talking about cyber warfare. Can you tell me more about that? Well, there's a lot of speculation that Iran has rather advanced cyber capabilities that it could use and that it would choose to use instead of a direct military assault on the U.S. So you've seen a lot of experts speculating on, you know, would you see attacks on U.S. civilian infrastructure, for example, power plants, a lot of which, frankly, is very vulnerable and has not been updated. And we know that there are actors. And frankly, the other things the Iranians can do is purchase or request the assistance of other cyber powers, like, for example, Russia, which, of course, has been very unhappy with U.S. actions in the Middle East and seems only too likely to be willing to help. Is there a scenario here where this thing just starts ratcheting up more? So, you know, Iran-backed forces in Iraq start attacking American bases or American targets, and then the United States responds by hitting these 52 targets that Donald Trump is talking about? Like, could this blow up? States responds by hitting these 52 targets that Donald Trump is talking about? Like, could this blow up? Absolutely. I mean, some other ways it could blow up is if at some point Iran or a proxy force decides to attack Israel, which is always one of your worries. So Hezbollah in Lebanon could attack Israel. Correct. And that could happen, by the way, that could happen with Iran's explicit

blessing, or you could have a freelancer, but you wouldn't be able to tell. And then you have a very weak Israeli government right now between elections, Prime Minister under indictment. They would certainly request a very strong US response. It would be very hard for this administration not to give it. And then that's one way, it's not the only way that you could see us ending up in the kind of frontal war that everyone says they want to avoid. Okay. And tell me, like, how equipped do you think the Trump administration is to deal with this conflict? So the thing that worries me most, the two things that worry me most are how many of the senior national security positions are held by people who are not very experienced. Because so many, I mean, he's cycled through so many defense secretaries, national security advisors, secretaries of state.

You don't have the team of people who know the region, who know the players, who've gone through these kinds of crises in the past. So that's one thing that concerns me. The second thing that concerns me is this doesn't, you know, any president, even one not as controversial as this one, needs advisors who can tell her or him no, and who he or she will actually listen to in a moment and who perceive that there's something, there's a greater national interest than the president's mood at any given moment. And I'm not sure we have that. And that could talk about, I know that you're based in Washington, but if we could talk about a country like Canada, you know, a solid middle power. NATO is meeting today on Monday to discuss the situation.

And here in Canada, our Foreign Affairs Minister, Francois-Philippe Champagne, he's been calling for restraint. Philippe Champagne had to say, the safety and well-being of Canadians in Iraq and the region, including our troops and diplomats, is our paramount concern. Where does this escalation put a country like ours? escalation put a country like ours. So one of the things about the way this unrolled that is very challenging for middle powers and also for the NATO alliance is the fact that the administration chose not to alert any of our traditional allies beforehand. Even though our traditional allies have service members with us in Iraq, have had service members in Syria and tend when there's retaliation, they tend to suffer in the retaliation along with us, whether they got a voice in the operation or not. So it does put America's traditional allies in a very challenging position that they certainly

did not ask to be put in. And I know we have about 500 Canadian military personnel in Iraq right now. Yes, you're now left in this situation where, you know, Canadians, Europeans are vulnerable to the things that Iran's proxy forces do, have suffered from terrorism in the region and outside the region over the years, but also see the dangers of escalation, and also are legitimately reluctant to get dragged into a fight that they would very much have preferred that the U.S. not start by staying in the Iran nuclear deal in the first place. So this kind of action puts a lot of strain on the alliance, and it raises really challenging questions about how middle powers conceptualize their role. Okay, Heather Hurlburt, thank you so much for waiting through

this with me. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Just before we go today, I want to play you a clip. On Sunday, CNN spoke to a top military advisor in Iran. He said essentially that any reprisal would be against U.S. military sites and would come directly from Iran, not from one of its proxy forces in other countries. It was America that has started the war. Therefore, they should accept appropriate reactions to their actions. The only thing that can end this period of war is for the Americans to receive a blow that is equal to the blow they've inflicted. Thousands of U.S. troops have now been deployed to Saudi Arabia

as the U.S. grows their presence in the region. We're going to be keeping tabs on that NATO meeting today that Heather and I mentioned, and we'll let you know of any significant developments. That's all for today, though. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening, and see you tomorrow.