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VOA \u2014 WASHINGTON – The January killing of powerful Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq has resulted in a new reality in which Iran is deterred from attacking American assets and those of its allies in the Middle East, said the top U.S. commander in the region.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think [killing Soleimani] has had a significant effect in establishing and reestablishing a rough form of deterrence in the theater,\u201d said General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the commander of United States Central Command (CENTCOM) on Wednesday during a webinar at the Middle East Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.<\/p>\n
Soleimani was a major figure in Iran\u2019s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) who oversaw the country\u2019s overseas military activities and its proxy forces. He was killed in Baghdad, along with several other Iranian and Iraqi militia leaders, in an operation ordered by U.S. President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
Days after the attack, Iran retaliated by firing about a dozen ballistic missiles at two U.S. bases in Iraq. While no U.S. service member was killed, more than a hundred American troops suffered brain injuries as a result of the Iranian response.<\/p>\n
Since January, McKenzie said, there has been a \u201cdecline\u201d in both direct attacks from Iran and indirect ones from its proxies, adding that the elimination of Soleimani sent a message to the Iranians that the U.S. has the capability and \u201cwill\u201d to act.<\/p>\n
Redline<\/strong><\/p>\n In 2019, Iran and its proxies were accused of orchestrating attacks on the U.S. and its allies. They included the bombing of oil tankers in the strait of Hormuz, the downing of a U.S. drone that had allegedly violated Iran\u2019s airspace and drone strikes that destroyed U.S. ally Saudi Arabia\u2019s oil installations.<\/p>\n None of that, however, appeared to have crossed a U.S. redline as much as the rocket attack in December 2019 by a pro-Iran militia group that killed an American contractor in a military base in northern Iraq. Soleimani was killed one week after that attack.<\/p>\n \u201cThey had pushed for many years to find a redline and they found a redline as the United States responded vigorously,\u201d McKenzie said.<\/p>\n The U.S. general\u2019s assessment of Iranian activities in the past six months is at odds with the initial fears that many harbored about the potential ramifications of assassinating a powerful Iranian general in a region already mired in turmoil.<\/p>\n Some experts continue to question the validity of the notion that killing Soleimani has enhanced the prospect for peace.<\/p>\n \u201cI do not believe that the Soleimani killing has restored deterrence,\u201d Barbara Slavin, director of the Atlantic Council\u2019s Future of Iran Initiative, told VOA.<\/p>\n \u201cThere have been subsequent incidents including in March when Iran-backed Iraqi militia rockets killed two Americans and a Brit. The Iranians also used their small boats to swarm U.S. Naval vessels in April \u2013 without any apparent U.S. response,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u2018Maximum pressure\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n Relations between the U.S. and Iran sharply deteriorated in May 2018 when the Trump administration withdrew from a nuclear deal that was aimed to curb Iran\u2019s nuclear ambitions.<\/p>\n The move was followed by the enactment of a U.S. policy referred to as a \u201cmaximum pressure\u201d campaign, which includes imposing crippling economic sanctions on Tehran.<\/p>\n The initial justification for killing Soleimani was that he had been planning imminent attacks on Americans. That U.S. position, however, seems to have extended to include further boosting U.S. deterrence posture against Iran.<\/p>\n \u201cPresident Trump and those of us in his national security team are re-establishing deterrence \u2013 real deterrence \u2012 against the Islamic Republic of Iran,\u201d U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said during a January speech at Stanford University\u2019s Hoover Institute.<\/p>\n US troops in Iraq<\/strong><\/p>\n One of Iran\u2019s stated goals is to expel U.S. troops from Iraq. On Thursday, U.S. and Iraq will engage in a ministerial level \u201cstrategic dialogue\u201d on the future of their relationship.<\/p>\n Iraqis remain bitterly divided on whether U.S. troops should remain in their country or not.<\/p>\n Regardless, McKenzie said he believed the Iraqi government would extend the mandate for his troops to stay and help Iraqi forces defeat the remnants of the Islamic State terror group.<\/p>\n Michael Pregent, a military expert with the Hudson Institute, said establishing permanent deterrence with Iran requires more U.S. military action.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Supreme Leader [of Iran] never thought the U.S. would take out its top general \u2026but more needs to be done to deal with the forces in Iraq that Iran uses to attack the U.S. by proxy,\u201d Pregent said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" VOA \u2014 WASHINGTON – The January killing of powerful Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq has resulted in a new reality in which Iran is deterred from attacking American assets and those of its allies in the Middle East, said the top U.S. commander in the region. \u201cI think [killing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":86602,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latests"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"en","enabled_languages":["fa","en"],"languages":{"fa":{"title":true,"content":false,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86601\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}