Tiptoeing past Armageddon: U.S. and Iranian forces' dangerous battlefield dance

WASHINGTON — On Feb. 1, 2017, exactly 12 days after President Trump’s inauguration, then-national security adviser Mike Flynn strode to the White House lectern to deliver a 101-second statement that excoriated Iran for its “destabilizing behavior across the entire Middle East.” Criticizing the administration of President Barack Obama for failing “to respond adequately to Tehran’s malign actions,” Flynn was blunt. “As of today,” he said, “we are officially putting Iran on notice.”

Almost 16 months later, on May 21, Trump’s new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, struck an even harsher tone. “We will track down Iranian operatives and their Hezbollah proxies operating around the world and we will crush them,” he said. “Iran will never again have carte blanche to dominate the Middle East.”

In the war of words, Iran responded in kind. “America is the No. 1 enemy of our nation,” Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said in November. “Any retreat by Iran will make America more blatant and impudent,” he said. “Resistance is the only option.”

But on the ground in Iraq, Syria and, to a lesser extent, Yemen, where thousands of U.S. soldiers are juxtaposed with those of Iran and its proxies, neither side has matched its bellicose rhetoric with any significant military action against the other. The very few military confrontations are the exceptions that prove the rule: Each side seems determined, for its own reasons, to avoid provoking the other. “We’re pretty good at staying out of each other’s way,” said Douglas Ollivant, a senior fellow at New America and former director for Iraq on the National Security Council.

This situation has led to bizarre contradictions in U.S. policy: In 2007 the U.S. government designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the leader of its Quds force, Qassem Soleimani, as supporters of terrorism. But Soleimani makes frequent trips to Iraq and Syria to negotiate with government leaders in each country and to reinforce the morale of his troops, seemingly oblivious to the presence of the United States’ most elite special operations forces, who apparently have no orders to apprehend him or any of his subordinates. In Iraq, some of his proxy forces drive around in U.S.-made M1 Abrams tanks given to them by the United States’ notional ally, the Iraqi government.

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