Until the Trump administration blew him away in Baghdad in the pre-dawn dark of Friday morning, Qassem Soleimani had made the very fact of his survival part of his considerable mystique. The powerful Iranian general commanded forces that had become the scourge of Iran’s adversaries abroad, especially
In fact, conscious decisions were taken under the George W. Bush administration, even when Soleimani was in the crosshairs, not to pull the trigger. Gen. Stanley McChrystal wrote last year, he had a shot in 2007 but let Soleimani go: “The decision not to act is often the hardest one to make—and it isn’t always right.”
Under the Barack Obama administration, the assassination of the most famous general in the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps appears not to have been considered seriously. The calculus was a fairly simple one, says Chollet: “Do the potential risks of taking an action like this outweigh the gain of taking him off the battlefield?” The answer was yes.According to Patricia Ravalgi, who served as a civilian analyst at U.S. Central Command from 2008 to 2019, concerns at the operational level went beyond declined opportunities to terminate Soleimani.
Then late one night, he and Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah’s most notorious terrorist operative, decided to remove Nasrallah to safety in a separate building. Shortly after their arrival, two Israeli bombardments struck nearby, he said. Mughniyeh’s luck did not last long. He was blown up in Damascus in 2008 in an operation later attributed jointly to the CIA and Israel’s Mossad.
The Obama administration “asked us not to proceed,” he said. “It was clear the implications could be much greater than a localized war, the repercussions could affect the whole world.”
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