Strikes and counter-strikes have taken place inside Iraq between American forces and Iranian forces based in Iraq. As I noted in that post, we may need to hit an Iranian Revolutionary Guards base hard.
The Iranians are trying to win that Iraq War 3.0, and have escalated to their signature move, the embassy attack. We have insisted that the Iraqis not stand by while the Iranians attack us.
America responded to the embassy attack by Iranian proxies (and no, you confused morons at the New York Times, the attackers weren't "mourners") by reinforcing our embassy with regional reserves (and some of the reinforcement came before the attacks). The attackers pulled out of the areas of the embassy our forces did not defend (we pulled into more defensible locations, I assume) today.
We have forces in Kuwait that can act as a rapid reaction force and are reinforcing that with about a battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division. The division keeps a brigade ready to go on short notice. The announcement only says it is going to CENTCOM but I assume that means Kuwait. But maybe not. I don't know if more of the brigade will go.
Remember, we have only about 5,000 troops in Iraq and no major combat units.
Although we have reinforced our forces in the region to be in a better position to defeat the Iranians on a broader front. If we have a Marine MEU in the region, I assume it is sailing toward the area. And Navy fleet units, too. And don't forget the Air Force. I've long said we have to be careful out there as the confrontation with Iran is waged on the economic level.
And yes, in response to Iran's attack on our Baghdad embassy we need to consider attacking the Iranians directly:
But [rather than attacks on Iranian proxies in Iraq] a better way to show Iran that we consider the embassy attack a massive miscalculation would be to destroy much of the Iranian Navy.
Hitting Iran at home is superior to letting the Iranians to fight us (or any other enemy) to the last dead Arab Iraqi. The fight against Iran's proxies in Iraq--which I've frequently mentioned--should be by arrest, cutting off funding, intelligence and targeted assassinations of Iranian leaders and agents in Iraq, and armed Iraqi action against the Iranian-controlled militias only as a last resort when the militias can't be brought under control or disbanded. We want to avoid turning Iraq into a battlefield that Iran can wreck as a consolation prize if they can't control Iraq.
But hitting Iran's navy is possibly misguided. We need to hit the Shia nutball jihadis and leave the normals alone. So the focus has to be on the Revolutionary Guards. That's why I specified them in that post near the top. Any attacks on Iranian regular armed forces need to be based on an understanding of the political leanings of the commanders and their recent actions.
Only if that ship, air unit, or ground unit of the regular military acts aggressively and has in the past should we target it.
If a regular military unit acts responsibly, we should not destroy it because it is a possible source of resistance to the mullahs. Don't do the mullahs' work for them by destroying potentially disloyal units.
We are waging a financial war against the Iranian economy. Iran is getting hurt enough to escalate to military means against our allies and against us directly now in order to change the losing course of the war. They want to scare us away by beating their chests and flinging poo at us.
Iran under the mullahs needs to be defeated before they get nuclear weapons. We have plenty of friends in Iraq who want to beat the Iranians (see this Strategypage post for that and other information). Those friends have been protesting for three months now and Iranian proxies have killed hundreds in Iraq. Don't be confused by high visibility events that Iran orchestrates and that some Americans are eager to portray as some kind of nationalistic resistance to us.
We can beat Iran. Will we try to win?
UPDATE: A summary and statement by our secretary of defense.
UPDATE: Well that's gonna leave a mark:
Iraqi TV and three Iraqi officials said Friday that Gen. Qassim Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, has been killed in an airstrike at Baghdad’s international airport.
The officials said the strike also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of Iran-backed militias known as the Popular Mobilization Forces.
If Iran thought it had complete control over the scope of the war Iran is waging, they are wrong, it seems.
UPDATE: We delivered the small measure of justice on the Revolutionary Guards:
At the direction of the President, the U.S. military has taken decisive defensive action to protect U.S. personnel abroad by killing Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force, a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.
Hundreds of our troops plus coalition troops were killed by his thugs in the Iraq War with the EFPs (explosively formed projectiles) Iran supplied to their proxies. And we can go back to the Beirut Barracks if you want to extend the timeline and include the Revolutionary Guards as a whole as people deserving some vengeance and justice.
They'll find a new bad guy to run Quds, but even if the disruption won't last forever the justice of Soleimani's death will.
UPDATE: I’m confused. People were oh so recently outraged that Trump didn’t go to war with NATO ally Turkey to defend Kurds in a narrow strip of territory bordering Turkey. But the same people are mad we struck back against “death to America “ Iran which has been waging war on us for over forty years. I don’t get nuance.
Seriously, Obama ignored this act of war and everyone was cool with it.
May Soleimani rot in Hell.
And let's stop fretting over what Iran might do to us. Let me channel General Grant (and Mattis):
Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.
Let's make the Iranians worry about what we can do to them.
UPDATE: The rest of the 82nd Airborne Division's ready brigade will deploy to CENTCOM:
The Pentagon is deploying roughly 3,500 more troops to the Middle East in response to rising tensions in the region with Iran and one day after a U.S. airstrike killed a top Iranian military commander.
The soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division could leave Fort Bragg in North Carolina for the Middle East as early as this weekend, two U.S. officials told ABC News.
"The brigade will deploy to Kuwait as an appropriate and precautionary action in response to increased threat levels against U.S. personnel and facilities, and will assist in reconstituting the reserve," a Defense Department spokesperson said in a statement.
The first battalion did go to Kuwait.
Oh, and the 173rd Airborne Brigade based in Italy is on alert for possible deployment to our embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, in case Iran wants to strike us there.
UPDATE: Apparently the strike on Soleimani got ahead of attacks he was planning. Good. As I said we need the initiative rather than letting them set the pace.
More on those threats.
UPDATE: So who else is willing to bomb Iran's proxies in Iraq?
The Iraqi army told Reuters that airstrikes targeting Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces - an umbrella grouping of Iran-backed Shi’ite militias - struck near Taji, north of Baghdad, killing five people and critically wounded three, an Iraqi army source said late on Friday. A US official denied that the attack was carried out by the Americans.
It would be nice if it was the Iraqi air force.
UPDATE: I forgot--or did not know--that Soleimani was involved in planning the attack on our Benghazi diplomatic and CIA outposts in 2012. No word on whether he was part of the video production that the Obama administration blamed for "provoking" the attack.
UPDATE: While not quite "in the region" the 26th MEU (Marine Expeditionary Unit--a reinforced battalion with air support) and its ARG (amphibious ready group) are pulling out of an exercise with Morocco to sail to the region.
Also, I assume that we have an armored brigade in Kuwait. We generally rotate one through Kuwait as a regional reserve.
