David Patrikarakos David Patrikarakos

Iran’s generals are weeping for Qasem Soleimani. But soon they will prepare to fight

It has been 24 hours since America droned Qasem Soleimani near Baghdad airport. Now both Iran and the United States are getting ready to deal with a new reality in the Middle East that has (quite literally) exploded into being.

There is a mutual recognition that when Soleimani died, the old rules of the game died alongside him. What is instructive about his assassination is not that it happened, but that it took so long. After all, this was a man whose carefully posed portrait spread across Twitter every time he visited yet another of Iran’s many wars in the region. If I knew when Haji Qasem was in Syria, then the Americans surely did too.

He had survived because, under the Obama and early Trump administrations, Washington feared the consequences of a dead Soleimani more than the malignancy of a living one. That has ended. The message is clear: American toleration for Iranian excess is not endless, even if it comes with a price.

If you hit Soleimani you must, at least, prepare to be hit back. A fact Washington appears to have accepted. Late yesterday, the US announced the impending arrival of around 3,000 more troops to the Middle East, mostly from the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Donald Trump claimed he ordered the strike to “stop a war, not start one” but there’s no harm preparing just in case.

On the Iranian side their reaction was almost as expected. As soon as the death was announced the Martyrdom operation kicked into play. The printers whirred and out spewed hagiographic posters of the now dead Soleimani, tacked onto walls and street corners and placed into clutched fists; then came the ubiquitous videos of senior regime officials openly weeping at the news. This particular ‘quirk’ has long confused Western pundits culturally conditioned to see crying as weak or unmanly.

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