The country’s beleaguered rulers gambled that they could force the United States to relax sanctions by exerting force, in the belief that Trump would not risk war in an election year. The regime was forced to shut down the Internet twice to maintain control. Approximately 1,000 protesters and 200 security personnel were killed.
15 triggered mass protests in two-thirds of Iran’s provinces. The Statistical Center for Iran puts the inflation rate at 47.2 percent.Ī 200 percent fuel price hike on Nov. The International Monetary Fund estimates that the Iranian economy shrank by 9.5 percent in 2019. Oil production is down by close to half since April 2018. Iran is in dire economic straits, largely thanks to US sanctions, which the Trump administration tightened last year. Related : Opinion | Matthew Bunn: We’re in for a rough ride with Iran The upside of killing Soleimani is that the Iran regime’s bluff has been called and its vulnerability exposed for everyone in the region to see. This assassination does nothing to solve the problem that was created by Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, when he decided to liquidate the US presence in Iraq in excessive haste, squandering all that had been achieved in the “surge” that ended the last Iraqi civil war. Significantly, the Iraqi prime minister, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, has condemned the US strike against Soleimani.
However, Iranian penetration of Shia militias and political parties means that it is dangerously close to becoming a vassal of Tehran. Freed from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny by the 2003 US invasion, it is a democracy with only limited US security support. Whereas Czechoslovakia had been partitioned and subordinated to Nazi rule, Iraq today is in a kind of limbo. The downside of killing Soleimani is that Iraq will now blow up. However, when an autocrat is killed, the probability of a transition to democracy rises. As Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken show in my favorite economics paper on this subject - which covers all 298 assassination attempts on national leaders from 1875 to 2004 - successful assassinations tend to increase the intensity of small-scale conflicts. They cannot risk a war with the vastly superior United States, which numbers among its allies both the richest state in the region (Saudi Arabia) and the most technologically advanced (Israel).Ī better analogy might be with the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, “the man with the iron heart” (Hitler’s grim accolade), the founding head of the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (security service), the creator of the genocidal Einsatzgruppen, and the brutal tyrant of the dismembered Czechoslovakia, who was fatally wounded by British-trained agents of the Czech government in exile in May 1942.īenjamin Disraeli, England’s first Jewish prime minister, famously observed, in response to President Abraham Lincoln’s murder, that “assassination has never changed the history of the world.” He was wrong. Today, Iran’s leaders are under no illusions. The great powers then were quite evenly matched each made the mistake of thinking that it might gain from a full-scale European war. Second, the Middle East in January 2020 is not Europe in June 1914. Soleimani’s career as a sponsor of terrorism puts him closer to the Sarajevo assassin, Gavrilo Princip, than to his victim. First, it was Bosnian Serb terrorists backed by Serbian military intelligence who carried out the hit on the legitimate heir to the august Austro-Hungarian imperial throne.
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