a Few rules, there are safer in the politics of the middle East than to ask who benefits from an attack. With the assassination of general Qasem Soleimani, a strategist, unscrupulous umbrella militia of another mode of warring, there are several regimes and leaders of different fur to rub their hands. For a variety of reasons.
Trump is the first one interested in this climbing of the eternal conflict with Iran, right now that is on the verge of impeachment and begins the year of his re-election. The attack against Soleimani, a radical response to the siege, a few days ago, the militia proiraníes to the Embassy of the USA in Bagdad, has to change by force the approach of the opinion of the u.s. about Trump, a president seen to date as reluctant to go down to the international arena.
Also to the heir of arabia, Mohamed bin Salman, who has lived through their darkest hours in 2019, will go to account of this escalation of the conflict between its major ally (the united States) and your worst enemy (Iran). Two of their clashes subsidiary with Iran —the war of Yemen and the boycott of Qatar— he had been complicated lately, and in the domestic, economic openness and seudomoral could not hide the brutal political repression. Now, you can assert yourself better inside and outside as the great ally of the united States.
Because without a doubt, the murder of Soleimani is a declaration of war that will be hard to dodge Iran. Its policy of raising or lowering the voltage of the confrontation with the US has ended by jumping the leads of the Administration of Donald Trump, a man of a generation who lived as a humiliation of colossal hostage taking of the U.s. Embassy in Tehran in 1979. Iranian leaders, with Ahmadinejad at the head of a regime every day more questioned internally, they have difficult to find an answer not to start a new war in Iraq. But to win this new war subsidiary is much more complicated than doing it in Syria or Yemen.
despite the proclamations incendiary Khamenei and the national mourning seeking revenge, will have to sopesarlo well. And there is a reason that minor, although in Iraq the leaders of shi’a is preparing to close ranks and regroup its militia, the murder alongside Soleimani Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, his right arm in Iraq, has left a vacuum of leadership that will be easy to fill if the war you want to fight in the soil of iraq. Muqtada al-Sadr, the crafty leader of the party Current Sadrista and of the Army of the Mahdi, is already offered as a successor and has arengado to his followers in the Parliament and in the street, to put the troops of the united STATES in the crosshairs. But it remains to be seen if you have the echo that I had at the time of the war against the u.s. military occupation. It is doubtful, because not in vain the new generations of iraqis have been mobilized massively in the last few months asking for the end of the regime is sectarian, the only one they have ever known.
A war with Iran either hurts them to Erdogan and Assad. The president Turkish, because it gives you the chance to get to his vantage point of a champion of the popular legitimacy sunni. The sirius, because, although Soleimani and his militias were instrumental in the massacre of the revolution, the reordering post-war will be easier with Iran’s entertaining on other fronts.
And what to say of Netanyahu, a great friend of the family Trump. That they will fulfill their craving for war with Iran (widespread in Israel, where for many the number one enemy is not Palestine, but Iran gives you a good push in the new election date, on which they intend to accusations of corruption against him. To the generals of the israeli Army, with ties either locked with the peshmergas are kurdish, not hurts them this distraction after the recent decision of the International Criminal Court to initiate an investigation of war crimes in the occupied palestinian territories.
The doubt falls, once more, on the side of Russia. It does not seem that it fits with their calculations to increase the tension in the region when it is about to pay off conveniently the war in Syria. Perhaps Putin is the only one able to soothe the tempers of each other; since then, the machinery is well-oiled. In any case, the big losers are the iraqis, who, after several months of popular revolts against a regime, sectarian, corrupt and managed by Iran and the U.S., see again how their country and its future are kidnapped.
Gómez is a professor of Arab Studies at the Autonomous University of Madrid. His most recent book is Between the sharia and the jihad. An intellectual history of islam (Cataract, 2018).
