Exclusive: Iran's response to US will be military -- Khamenei's adviser
By Fred Pleitgen, Tim Lister and Schams Elwazer, CNN Updated 9:44 AM ET, Sun January 5, 2020
Tehran, Iran (CNN)The military adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader said Sunday that Tehran's response to the killing by the United States of its most most influential general will "for sure be military."
In an exclusive interview with CNN in Tehran, the adviser -- Maj. Gen. Hossein Dehghan -- made the most specific and direct threat yet by a senior Iranian official following the killing of Gen. Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike in Baghdad. Dehghan said Iran would retaliate directly against US "military sites."
Dehghan said Iran would retaliate directly against US "military sites."
Dehghan is a former defense minister and is now the main military adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He told CNN that reprisals would come from Iran itself, not its allied militia in the region.
"It might be argued that there could be proxy operations. We can say America, Mr. Trump, has taken action directly against us -- so we take direct action against America."
The United States has a growing military presence in the region. Thousands of US troops have been deployed to Saudi Arabia, and there are some 5,000 at bases in Iraq. The US also has a major air base in Qatar and a naval presence in Bahrain, as well as troops stationed in Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
In common with other Iranian officials, Dehghan suggested that Iran was in no hurry to retaliate and would choose its targets carefully. "Our reaction will be wise, well considered and in time, with decisive deterrent effect."
Iran's President Hassan Rouhani had earlier said that Americans would face consequences for killing Soleimani "not only today, but also in the coming years."
Given the rhetoric of both sides, there is a growing risk of escalation in what has become the most dangerous confrontation between the US and Iran in decades.
As Tensions With Iran Escalated, Trump Opted for Most Extreme Measure
"The Latest: Iraq parliament votes to expel US military"
Since Trump decided it was justified in going after Suleimani does it follow Trump will feel justified in going after Suleimani's replacement?
While senior officials argue the drone strike was warranted to prevent future attacks, some in the administration remain skeptical about the rationale for the attack.
Iranians in Tehran on Saturday protesting the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani. Ebrahim Noroozi/Associated Press
By Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt, Maggie Haberman and Rukmini Callimachi
Published Jan. 4, 2020 Updated Jan. 5, 2020, 12:04 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — In the chaotic days leading to the death of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s most powerful commander, top American military officials put the option of killing him — which they viewed as the most extreme response to recent Iranian-led violence in Iraq — on the menu they presented to President Trump.
They didn’t think he would take it. In the wars waged since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Pentagon officials have often offered improbable options to presidents to make other possibilities appear more palatable.
After initially rejecting the Suleimani option on Dec. 28 and authorizing airstrikes on an Iranian-backed Shiite militia group instead, a few days later Mr. Trump watched, fuming, as television reports showed Iranian-backed attacks on the American Embassy in Baghdad, according to Defense Department and administration officials.
By late Thursday, the president had gone for the extreme option. Top Pentagon officials were stunned.
President Trump spoke on Friday about the airstrike that killed Mr. Suleimani at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla. Eric Thayer for The New York Times
Mr. Trump made the decision, senior officials said on Saturday, despite disputes in the administration about the significance of what some officials said was a new stream of intelligence that warned of threats to American embassies, consulates and military personnel in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. General Suleimani had just completed a tour of his forces in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, and was planning an “imminent” attack that could claim hundreds of lives, those officials said.
“Days, weeks,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Friday, when asked how imminent any attacks could be, without offering more detail other than to say that new information about unspecified plotting was “clear and unambiguous.”
But some officials voiced private skepticism about the rationale for a strike on General Suleimani, who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American troops over the years. According to one United States official, the new intelligence indicated “a normal Monday in the Middle East” — Dec. 30 — and General Suleimani’s travels amounted to “business as usual.”
That official described the intelligence as thin and said that General Suleimani’s attack was not imminent because of communications the United States had between Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and General Suleimani showing that the ayatollah had not yet approved any plans by the general for an attack. The ayatollah, according to the communications, had asked General Suleimani to come to Tehran for further discussions at least a week before his death.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence were two of the most hawkish voices arguing for a response to Iranian aggression, according to administration officials. Mr. Pence’s office helped run herd on meetings and conference calls held by officials in the run-up to the strike.
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and General Milley declined to comment for this article, but General Milley’s spokeswoman, Col. DeDe Halfhill, said, without elaborating, that “some of the characterizations being asserted by other sources are false” and that she would not discuss conversations between General Milley and the president.
The fallout from Mr. Trump’s targeted killing is now underway. On Saturday in Iraq, the American military was on alert as tens of thousands of pro-Iranian fighters marched through the streets of Baghdad and calls accelerated to eject the United States from the country. United States Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East, said there were two rocket attacks near Iraqi bases that host American troops, but no one was injured.
In Iran, the ayatollah vowed “forceful revenge” as the country mourned the death of General Suleimani.
In Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. Trump lashed back, promising to strike 52 sites across Iran — representing the number of American hostages taken by Iran in 1979 — if Iran attacked Americans or American interests. On Saturday night, Mr. Trump warned on Twitter .. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1213593975732527112 .. that some sites were “at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.”
The president issued those warnings after American spy agencies on Saturday detected that Iranian ballistic missile units across the country had gone to a heightened state of readiness, a United States official said on Saturday night.
Other officials said it was unclear whether Iran was dispersing its ballistic missile units — the heart of the Iranian military — to avoid American attack, or was mobilizing the units for a major strike against American targets or allies in the region in retaliation for General Suleimani’s death.
On Capitol Hill, Democrats voiced growing suspicions about the intelligence that led to the killing. At the White House, officials formally notified .. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/04/us/politics/white-house-war-powers-resolution.html .. Congress of a war powers resolution with what the administration said was a legal justification for the strike.
Officials mobilized some 3,500 soldiers from Fort Bragg, N.C., one of the largest rapid deployments in decades. Travis Dove for The New York Times
General Suleimani, who was considered the most important person in Iran after Ayatollah Khamenei, was a commanding general of a sovereign government. The last time the United States killed a major military leader in a foreign country was during World War II, when the American military shot down the plane carrying the Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
But administration officials are playing down General Suleimani’s status as a part of the Iranian state, suggesting his title gave him cover for terrorist activities. In the days since his death, they have sought to describe the strike as more in line with the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State leader, who died in October .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/27/world/middleeast/al-baghdadi-dead.html .. in an American commando raid in Syria.
----- [That spin, of course is rubbish. Suleimani was an important figure in a recognized country. See good one .. felt a refresher on background past would be useful 2008 US/IRAQ: Petraeus Testimony to Defend False "Proxy War" Line Analysis by Gareth Porter* P - WASHINGTON, Apr 7 (IPS) - A key objective of the Congressional testimony by Gen. David Petraeus this week will be to defend the George W. Bush administration's strategic political line that it is fighting an Iranian "proxy war" in Iraq. [...] By all accounts, Iran played a decisive role in hammering out the peace deal among the Shi'ite factions in Iraq. A bloody week of human killing on the Tigris River ended on Sunday. Details are sketchy, however, since they must come from non-Iranian sources. Tehran keeps silent about its role. P - The deal was brokered after negotiations in the holy city of Qom in Iran involving the two Shi'ite factions - the Da'wa Party and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC)- which have been locked in conflict with Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in southern Iraq. It appears that one of the most shadowy figures of the Iranian security establishment, General Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Quds Force of Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) personally mediated in the intra-Iraqi Shi'ite negotiations. Suleimani is in charge of the IRGC's operations abroad. .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=28191350 http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=28300329] -----
Administration officials insisted they did not anticipate sweeping retaliation from Iran, in part because of divisions in the Iranian leadership. But Mr. Trump’s two predecessors — Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama — had rejected killing General Suleimani as too provocative.
General Suleimani had been in Mr. Trump’s sights since the beginning of the administration, although it was a Dec. 27 rocket attack .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/us/politics/american-rocket-attack-iraq.html .. on an Iraqi military base outside Kirkuk, which left an American civilian contractor dead, that set the killing in motion.
General Milley and Mr. Esper traveled on Sunday to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Palm Beach resort, a day after officials presented the president with an initial list of options for how to deal with escalating violence against American targets in Iraq.
The options included strikes on Iranian ships or missile facilities or against Iranian-backed militia groups in Iraq. The Pentagon also tacked on the choice of targeting General Suleimani, mainly to make other options seem reasonable.
Mr. Trump chose strikes against militia groups. On Sunday, the Pentagon announced that airstrikes approved by the president had struck three locations in Iraq and two in Syria controlled by the group, Kataib Hezbollah.
Jonathan Hoffman, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said the targets included weapons storage facilities and command posts used to attack American and partner forces. About two dozen militia fighters were killed.
Protesters on Tuesday at the American Embassy in Baghdad. Khalid Mohammed/Associated Press
“These were on remote sites,” General Milley told reporters on Friday in his Pentagon office. “There was no collateral damage.”
But the Iranians viewed the strikes as out of proportion to their attack on the Iraqi base and Iraqis, largely members of Iranian-backed militias, staged violent protests outside the American Embassy in Baghdad. Mr. Trump, who aides said had on his mind the specter of the 2012 attacks on the American compound in Benghazi, Libya, became increasingly angry as he watched television images of pro-Iranian demonstrators storming the embassy. Aides said he worried that no response would look weak after repeated threats by the United States.
When Mr. Trump chose the option of killing General Suleimani, top military officials, flabbergasted, were immediately alarmed about the prospect of Iranian retaliatory strikes on American troops in the region. It is unclear if General Milley or Mr. Esper pushed back on the president’s decision.
Over the next several days, the military’s Special Operations Command looked for an opportunity to hit General Suleimani, who operated in the open and was treated like a celebrity in many places he visited in the Middle East. Military and intelligence officials said the strike drew on information from secret informants, electronic intercepts, reconnaissance aircraft and other surveillance tools.
The option that was eventually approved depended on who would greet General Suleimani at his expected arrival on Friday at Baghdad International Airport. If he was met by Iraqi government officials allied with Americans, one American official said, the strike would be called off. But the official said it was a “clean party,” meaning members of Kataib Hezbollah, including its leader, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis .. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/world/middleeast/Iraq-Iran-Mohandis-airstrike.html . Mr. Trump authorized the killing at about 5 p.m. on Thursday, officials said.
[Well, in there is a defensive strategy for enemies of the U.S. to consider in future.]
On Friday, missiles fired from an American MQ-9 Reaper blew up General Suleimani’s convoy as it departed the airport.
Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent, and was part of the team awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, for its coverage of the Ebola epidemic. @helenecooper
Eric Schmitt is a senior writer who has traveled the world covering terrorism and national security. He was also the Pentagon correspondent. A member of the Times staff since 1983, he has shared three Pulitzer Prizes. @EricSchmittNYT
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent. She joined The Times in 2015 as a campaign correspondent and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. Previously, she worked at Politico, The New York Post and The New York Daily News. @maggieNYT
Rukmini Callimachi covers Al Qaeda and ISIS and is a four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. Before joining The Times in 2014, she spent seven years reporting from Africa for The Associated Press. @rcallimachi
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