Washington: The Trump administration has signaled a new phase in its confrontation with Iran, threatening to retaliate for attacks by Iranian-backed militants in Iraq, even as it moves to avoid a potentially messy public split with allies over President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal.
Days after rocket strikes near American diplomatic facilities in Baghdad and Basra, the White House blamed Shiite militia groups on Wednesday and said, “Iran did not act to stop these attacks by its proxies in Iraq, which it has supported with funding, training and weapons.”
The statement came days before President Donald Trump and Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, are scheduled to attend the yearly meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, and it underscores Trump’s determination to raise pressure on the Iranian leadership.
Trump had planned to use a session of the Security Council, which he is presiding over, to dramatise Iran’s malign behaviour throughout the Middle East. But with aides and European allies warning that Iran could exploit the meeting to spotlight Western division over the nuclear deal, the White House has broadened the agenda to nonproliferation, a less loaded theme.
Taken together, these two moves point to the challenge facing the Trump administration as it tries to shift the focus from the agreement brokered by Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, to Iran’s destabilising actions in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon.
“They haven’t done a good job of articulating what their strategy is,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an expert on Iran at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The administration, he said, still appeared split between hard-liners who want to bring the regime to its knees and others who are open to some kind of grand bargain. At times, that group seems to include Trump himself. He has more than once expressed a willingness to meet with Rouhani, an invitation the Iranian leader has yet to accept.
The president has boasted that his decision to abandon the nuclear deal, and reimpose sanctions on Iran, had already forced the Iranian leadership to curb its behaviour in the region. “Iran is not the same country that it was a few months ago,” he said in June. “They’re a much, much different group of leaders.”
Yet the White House’s latest statement suggests the threat from Iran has swelled rather than subsided. While the rocket attacks by Shiite militias caused no American casualties or property damage, they demonstrated the extent to which Iran’s influence has paralysed its neighbour since Iraq held parliamentary elections in May that failed to produce a government.
The administration has compiled a list of statistics to show Iran’s continued funding of militant groups throughout the Middle East: $700 million to Hezbollah in Lebanon; more than $100 million a year to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad; at least $16 billion to allies and proxies in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.
Beyond warning that “America will respond swiftly and decisively in defence of American lives,” the White House offered no details about how the United States would retaliate against Iran for the attacks in Iraq. Officials at the Defence Department said there were no increased military preparations. Striking back, they warned, could provoke asymmetric attacks against American military and civilians by Iranian proxies elsewhere.
A Pentagon spokesman, Commander Sean Robertson, referred all questions to the White House.
When Defence Secretary Jim Mattis served as commander of the military’s Central Command during the Obama administration, he blamed Iran for deadly attacks by Shiite militias in Iraq. He advocated confronting Iran, a position that put him at odds with Obama, who was then trying to engage Iran diplomatically.
In the Trump administration, however, Mattis has taken a more moderate line. He joined former Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson in trying to persuade Trump not to leave the nuclear deal, and has used more measured language.
Moreover, the situation in Iraq is complicated; Iran, too, has been a target of violent protests. In the southern city of Basra, where rockets struck an airport complex that houses the US Consulate, crowds ransacked and burned the Iranian Consulate.
The White House statement, some officials said, was mostly intended to send Iran a signal, not unlike in February 2017, when Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, responded to the launch of an Iranian ballistic missile by saying, “As of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice.”
It also sets the stage for Trump’s appearance at the United Nations, his first since he abandoned the nuclear deal. The president had planned to devote an entire session of the Security Council to Iran, officials said, a prospect that rattled some of his aides and European officials, who envisioned the diplomatic equivalent of his TV show, “The Apprentice.”
Among those was John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser who once served as ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton, several officials said, made the case that focusing only on Iran would give Iran and Russia a platform to broadcast an anti-American message.
By broadening the agenda to nonproliferation, Trump can talk about the status of his nuclear negotiations with North Korea and about the use of chemical weapons by Bashar Al Assad’s regime in Syria - a topic Britain wanted to raise in the Security Council.
