POLITICO
CONGRESS
Bolton curveball threatens to upend impeachment trial
Bolton’s offer is a win for Senate Democrats, who have sought additional testimony and documents against the president.
By ANDREW DESIDERIO and KYLE CHENEY
01/06/2020 12:03 PM ES
Former national security adviser John Bolton said Monday that he would testify if he is subpoenaed as part of the Senate’s impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.
In a statement posted online, Bolton, who was asked to testify as part of the House’s impeachment inquiry but refused to appear for a deposition, said he wants to meet his “obligations” both as a citizen and as a former top presidential adviser.
“Since my testimony is once again at issue, I have had to resolve the serious competing issues as best I could, based on careful consideration and study,” Bolton wrote. “I have concluded that, if the Senate issues a subpoena for my testimony, I am prepared to testify.”
Bolton’s surprise offer comes as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) remain at an impasse over the parameters for the chamber’s trial. Schumer has been pushing McConnell to allow additional witness testimony and document production as part of the trial, but McConnell has maintained that those issues should be considered after the trial begins.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
“It is now up to four Senate Republicans to support bringing in Mr. Bolton,” Schumer said in a statement, renewing his demand for three other witnesses to appear for testimony: acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, top Mulvaney aide Robert Blair and senior budget official Michael Duffey. All three refused to appear for testimony before House impeachment investigators.
“If any Senate Republican opposes issuing subpoenas to the four witnesses and documents we have requested they would make absolutely clear they are participating in a cover up,” Schumer added, noting that Bolton’s lawyer has already said his client has information to share with investigators that has not been previously disclosed.
The statement from Bolton — who has remained relatively quiet since Trump fired him last year — hands Senate Democrats a new weapon as they seek to exert pressure on Republicans to call witnesses and seek documentary evidence to add to the House’s articles of impeachment. A Senate subpoena requires at least 51 votes, and four Republicans would need to vote with Democrats.
One of those potential GOP votes, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, said he would “of course” want to hear from Bolton. But he stopped short of declaring he would vote in favor of subpoenaing Bolton, adding: “What’s important is that we hear from him.”
Before his announcement, Bolton, who has been described as a central witness to the allegations for which the House impeached Trump, gave a heads up to McConnell informing the majority leader of his decision, according a source familiar with the matter.
GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas did not rule out voting to subpoena Bolton, but said the question of witnesses should be left for later in the trial, echoing McConnell’s position. He suggested if that occurred, it could actually help Trump’s case.
“What I think Bolton could say, this is a disagreement over the way foreign policy is being conducted. There’s no crime being judged,” Cornyn told reporters. “I have no objection to his testifying either through his deposition or some pre-recorded testimony. To me it amounts to an admission that what they’ve presented so far is pretty thin gruel.”
CONGRESS
Bolton’s move also unleashes new and complicated constitutional questions, including whether the House will attempt to subpoena Bolton now that he has acknowledged his willingness to comply with a congressional subpoena. Bolton’s pronouncement also raises the question of whether Trump could intervene to block his testimony.
Amid the clashes between McConnell and Schumer, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has refused to formally transmit the impeachment articles to the Senate. The House impeached Trump on Dec. 18, but Pelosi has said she wants to wait until the parameters of the Senate trial become clearer. Senators expect Pelosi to send the articles later this week.
“The president & Sen. McConnell have run out of excuses,” Pelosi wrote on Twitter Monday. “They must allow key witnesses to testify, and produce the documents Trump has blocked, so Americans can see the facts for themselves. The Senate cannot be complicit in the president’s cover-up.”
Bolton was not subpoenaed as part of the House’s impeachment inquiry, and he did not say in his statement whether he would comply with a subpoena from the lower chamber. A spokeswoman for Bolton declined to comment on whether he would honor a House subpoena.
Bolton indicated that he had initially planned to decide whether to testify based on the outcome of a court case brought by his former deputy, Charles Kupperman. Kupperman — who had been subpoenaed to testify in the House’s impeachment inquiry but was ordered by Trump not to appear — sought a federal court ruling to resolve the conflicting demands.
But the House, seeking to disentangle its impeachment push from ongoing litigation, withdrew its subpoena and promised not to punish Kupperman for refusing to testify. The White House, too, urged the court to drop the case, claiming Kupperman was immune from testifying. Last week, Judge Richard Leon agreed, ending the short-lived court battle. Bolton acknowledged that decision, saying Leon issued a “carefully reasoned opinion.”
“It now falls to the Senate to fulfill its constitutional obligation to try impeachments, and it does not appear possible that a final judicial resolution of the still-unanswered constitutional questions can be obtained before the Senate acts,” Bolton said Monday.
Bolton’s testimony would be a major break for impeachment investigators.
Senior State Department and White House officials described Bolton as a central witness to Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals. According to former National Security Council aide Fiona Hill, Bolton bristled at Trump’s reliance on his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to conduct back-channel talks with Ukrainians in service of Trump’s efforts. Hill recalled that Bolton referred to the matter as a “drug deal,” adding that Bolton called Giuliani a “hand grenade” who threatened to blow up U.S. foreign policy goals.
A lawyer for Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine adviser on the National Security Council, said Vindman “would definitely support” Bolton’s testimony.
“It will corroborate [Vindman’s] testimony as well as Dr. Fiona Hill’s testimony," said the lawyer, Michael Volkov. Vindman and Hill, the NSC’s former top Russia adviser, told lawmakers that Bolton was opposed to Trump’s withholding of military aid to Ukraine.
Vindman does not harbor any resentment toward Bolton for refusing to testify in the House inquiry, Volkov said. “He admires Bolton and followed his directions at all times.”
Democrats said the aid was frozen to pressure Ukraine’s new president to launch Trump’s desired investigations. The White House has blocked several central witnesses to the decision on military aid from testifying before impeachment investigators.
NEWS ON TRUMP IMPEACHMENT
Iran cultural sights------
As soon as the news of the killing of Qasem Soleimani broke, Iranians were divided. Some were offended and some celebrated it on social media.
The division got ugly on Twitter. Some were accused of being victims of “Stockholm syndrome” because they were angry about the killing, and others were labelled traitors.
But US President Donald Trump’s tweet threatening the targeting of Iran’s cultural sites united Iranians against him.
Some of the sites are religious and some are not, but secular and religious Iranians are proud of their heritage and came together to denounce the president’s threats. Nothing could better unite divided Iranians at home and in the diaspora than a hit on their beloved past.
Iran’s foreign minister seized the opportunity and in several tweets compared President Trump to the Islamic State group, which destroyed many cultural sites in Syria.
Presentational grey line
Iran’s top cultural sites
Iran is home to two dozen Unesco World Heritage sites. These are landmarks the UN body believes need preserving for their cultural, historic or scientific significance. They include:
Persepolis, the capital of the ancient Persian Achaemenid Empire, whose earliest remains date back to the 6th Century BC
Image copyrightALAMYAchaemenid inscription at Behistun, Iran
Naqsh-e Jahan Square in the city of Isfahan, which was built in the early 17th Century and is one of the largest city squares in the world
Image copyrightGETTY IMAGESTiled Architecture of Imam Mosque, Isfahan
Golestan Palace in Tehran, the residence and seat of power for the Qajar dynasty which ruled Iran from 1785 to 1925
There are also a number of sites which - while not listed by Unesco - still retain huge cultural importance.
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Trump under fire for threat to Iranian cultural sites
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06 January 2020
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Image captionNaqsh-e Jahan Square, in the city of Isfahan, is one of two dozen Unesco World Heritage sites in Iran
US President Donald Trump has faced growing criticism over his threats to attack Iran’s cultural sites.
Mr Trump made the threats amid fallout from the US assassination of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.
The president said cultural sites were among 52 identified Iranian targets that could be attacked if Iranians “torture, maim and blow up our people”.
But the UN’s cultural organisation and UK foreign secretary were among those to note that such sites were protected.
The US and Iran have signed conventions to protect cultural heritage, including during conflict. Military attacks targeting cultural sites are considered war crimes under international law.
Qasem Soleimani was killed in a US drone strike in Baghdad on Friday on the orders of Mr Trump. The killing has sharply increased regional tensions, with Iran threatening “severe revenge”.
What were the president’s threats?
The first came in a series of tweets on Saturday.
Mr Trump said the US had identified 52 Iranian sites, some “at a very high level and important to Iran and the Iranian culture”, and warned they would be “hit very fast and hard” if Tehran carried out revenge attacks on US interests or personnel.
US ready to strike 52 Iranian sites, Trump warns
Who was Iran’s Qasem Soleimani?
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appeared to try to soften the threat by saying the US would act within international law.
But the president later repeated his threat, saying: “They’re allowed to kill our people, they’re allowed to torture and maim our people, they’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people - and we’re not allowed to touch their cultural site? It doesn’t work that way.”
On Monday, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway defended the president, saying he had not said he was targeting cultural sites, only “asking the question”.
She also said: “Iran has many strategic military sites that you may cite are also cultural sites”, before later clarifying her remark to say she was not suggesting Iran had camouflaged military targets as cultural sites.
Defence Secretary Mark Esper was later asked if the US would target cultural sites, and said: “We will follow the laws of armed conflict.”
When asked if that meant no, “because targeting a cultural site is a war crime?”, he responded: “That’s the laws of armed conflict.”
What criticism did his comments draw?
The director general of the UN’s cultural organisation, Unesco, Audrey Azoulay, said both Iran and the US had signed a 1972 convention to protect the world’s natural and cultural heritage .
They have also both signed a 1954 convention protecting cultural property in the event of armed conflict . Mr Trump withdrew the US from Unesco in 2018, citing alleged anti-Israeli bias.
US Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Murphy said Mr Trump was “threatening to commit war crimes”, echoing similar statements by Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.
On Monday, UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said cultural sites were protected by international law, and Britain expected that to be respected.
The wider region has suffered many cultural attacks carried out by the Islamic State group, which targeted mosques, shrines, churches and famous sites such as Palmyra in Syria. The Taliban in Afghanistan destroyed the world’s tallest Buddha statues, in Bamiyan province.
Video captionOnce destroyed by the Taliban, the Buddha statues live again
Trump’s cultural sites threat unites Iranians
By Sam Farzaneh, BBC Persian
As soon as the news of the killing of Qasem Soleimani broke, Iranians were divided. Some were offended and some celebrated it on social media.
The division got ugly on Twitter. Some were accused of being victims of “Stockholm syndrome” because they were angry about the killing, and others were labelled traitors.
But US President Donald Trump’s tweet threatening the targeting of Iran’s cultural sites united Iranians against him.
Some of the sites are religious and some are not, but secular and religious Iranians are proud of their heritage and came together to denounce the president’s threats. Nothing could better unite divided Iranians at home and in the diaspora than a hit on their beloved past.
Iran’s foreign minister seized the opportunity and in several tweets compared President Trump to the Islamic State group, which destroyed many cultural sites in Syria.
Iran’s top cultural sites
Iran is home to two dozen Unesco World Heritage sites. These are landmarks the UN body believes need preserving for their cultural, historic or scientific significance. They include:
Persepolis, the capital of the ancient Persian Achaemenid Empire, whose earliest remains date back to the 6th Century BC
Naqsh-e Jahan Square in the city of Isfahan, which was built in the early 17th Century and is one of the largest city squares in the world
Golestan Palace in Tehran, the residence and seat of power for the Qajar dynasty which ruled Iran from 1785 to 1925
There are also a number of sites which - while not listed by Unesco - still retain huge cultural importance.
Copyright © 2020 BBC. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.
Senate cover-up? So’re smells like:
POLITICO
CONGRESS
GOP moderates side with McConnell over Bolton testimony
Democrats are unlikely to get four Republicans to vote to subpoena John Bolton
01/06/2020 05:56 PM EST
Despite John Bolton’s willingness to testify about the Ukraine scandal, the GOP-controlled Senate has no immediate plans to subpoena him in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial — a win for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the White House.
While Democrats have called for testimony from Trump’s former national security adviser, so far there’s no sign that they will secure support from four Republicans they would need to follow through on their demand.
In their bid for a “fair trial,” Democrats were hoping moderate Republicans like Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah will endorse their efforts to bring in Bolton and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to testify at the trial. They also want to subpoena documents related to the Ukraine scandal.
But on Monday, Collins and Murkowski both signaled they wanted to begin the trial first. “I believe that the Senate should follow the precedent that was established in the trial of President Clinton,” Collins said, echoing McConnell’s argument. “I think that we will decide at that stage who we need to hear from.”
Murkowski, when asked about a potential Bolton subpoena, said: “We’ve got to get to the first place first.”
Romney said he was open to hearing testimony from Bolton, but he stopped short of saying he would vote with Democrats to subpoena him. Romney acknowledged Bolton “has firsthand information” on the Ukraine scandal, and “assuming that articles of impeachment reach the Senate, I’d like to hear what he has to say.”
Even vulnerable Republicans, such as Cory Gardner of Colorado, who faces a competitive re-election race in 2020, expressed no interest in hearing from Bolton.
“Is Nancy going to send the articles over? She doesn’t seem to care?” said Gardner, referring to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "You guys want to have a trial by Twitter but until she has the articles sent over there is no trial.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s allies are losing patience with Pelosi and are accusing her of trying to dictate the terms of the Senate trial by withholding the articles of impeachment. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a staunch Trump ally, reiterated Monday he would move to change Senate rules to allow the chamber to move forward on its own authority, if Pelosi refuses to transmit the articles soon.
“From my view, I think we should urge the speaker to send over the articles [of impeachment]. If she doesn’t, we should change the rules,” Graham told reporters on Monday. “You can’t let her use the rules against us. She has a duty to transmit them.”
“I don’t want to turn the Senate over to Nancy Pelosi,” Graham added.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) also introduced his own resolution Monday that would allow the Senate to dismiss the articles of impeachment “for lack of prosecution.”
“My view is that the majority leader’s made a very generous offer to Democrats, which is: Let’s use the Clinton rules and start this trial. And we can decide witnesses and so forth later,” Hawley said. “Now, I don’t know why we would call witnesses on the Democrat side. They’ve had their chance.”
Hawley and other Republicans have argued that they should rely on the same information the House used to impeach the president. In their view, if the House could impeach Trump based on the information presented to the chamber, the Senate can make its decisions based on the same evidence.
The House voted in December to impeach Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, after he pressured the Ukrainian government to investigate his political rivals in exchange for military aid.
CONGRESS
Bolton curveball threatens to upend impeachment trial
BY ANDREW DESIDERIO AND KYLE CHENEY
McConnell and Schumer sparred again about the terms of the Senate impeachment trial on the floor Monday. McConnell is insisting the Senate use the same format as President Bill Clinton’s 1999 impeachment trial, when the Senate decided unanimously to initially hear arguments and then call witnesses.
“The Senate has a unanimous bipartisan precedent for when to handle mid-trial questions such as witnesses: In the middle of the trial,” McConnell said Monday. “The Senate said, 100 to nothing, that was good enough for President Clinton. So it ought to be good enough for President Trump. Fair is fair.”
But Schumer has rejected that argument, noting the Clinton impeachment trial had sworn testimony from witnesses.
“Leader McConnell’s view of the trial is an Alice-in-Wonderland view,” Schumer said. “When Leader McConnell proposes that we follow the 1999 precedent, he is essentially arguing that we should conduct the entire impeachment trial first, and then once it’s over, decide on whether we need witnesses and documents.”
© 2020 POLITICO LLC
The New York Times
Opinion
The Nightmare Stage of Trump’s Rule Is Here
Unstable and impeached, the president pushes the U.S. toward war with Iran.

By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist
Jan. 6, 2020
After three harrowing years, we’ve reached the point many of us feared from the moment Donald Trump was elected. His decision to kill Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s second most important official, made at Mar-a-Lago with little discernible deliberation, has brought the United States to the brink of a devastating new conflict in the Middle East.
We don’t yet know how Iran will retaliate, or whether all-out war will be averted. But already, NATO has suspended its mission training Iraqi forces to fight ISIS. Iraq’s Parliament has voted to expel American troops — a longtime Iranian objective. (On Monday, U.S. forces sent a letter saying they were withdrawing from Iraq in response, only to then claim that it was a draft released in error.) On Sunday, Iran said it will no longer be bound by the remaining restrictions on its nuclear program in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the deal that Trump abandoned in 2018. Trump has been threatening to commit war crimes by destroying Iran’s cultural sites and tried to use Twitter to notify Congress of his intention to respond to any Iranian reprisals with military escalation.
THE ARGUMENT
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The administration has said that the killing of Suleimani was justified by an imminent threat to American lives, but there is no reason to believe this. One skeptical American official told The New York Times that the new intelligence indicated nothing but “a normal Monday in the Middle East,” and Democrats briefed on it were unconvinced by the administration’s case. The Washington Post reported that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — who last year agreed with a Christian Broadcasting Network interviewer that God might have sent Trump to save Israel from the “Iranian menace” — has been pushing for a hit on Suleimani for months.
Rather than self-defense, the Suleimani killing seems like the dreadful result of several intersecting dynamics. There’s the influence of rapture-mad Iran hawks like Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence. Defense officials who might have stood up to Trump have all left the administration. According to Peter Bergen’s book “Trump and His Generals,” James Mattis, Trump’s former secretary of defense, instructed his subordinates not to provide the president with options for a military showdown with Iran. But with Mattis gone, military officials, The Times reported, presented Trump with the possibility of killing Suleimani as the “most extreme” option on a menu of choices, and were “flabbergasted” when he picked it.
Trump likely had mixed motives. He was reportedly upset over TV images of militia supporters storming the American Embassy in Iraq. According to The Post, he also was frustrated by “negative coverage” of his decision last year to order and then call off strikes on Iran.
Beyond that, Trump, now impeached and facing trial in the Senate, has laid out his rationale over years of tweets. The president is a master of projection, and his accusations against others are a decent guide to how he himself will behave. He told us, over and over again, that he believed Barack Obama would start a war with Iran to “save face” and because his “poll numbers are in a tailspin” and he needed to “get re-elected.” To Trump, a wag-the-dog war with Iran evidently seemed like a natural move for a president in trouble.
It’s hard to see how this ends without disaster. Defenders of Trump’s move have suggested that he might have re-established deterrence against Iran, frightening its leadership into restraint. But Vali Nasr, a Middle East scholar at Johns Hopkins University and former senior adviser to Obama’s State Department, tells me that Iran likely believes that it has to re-establish deterrence against the United States.
“If they don’t do anything, or if they don’t do enough, then Trump will get comfortable with this kind of behavior, and that worries them,” said Nasr. To Iranians, after all, America is the aggressor, scrapping a nuclear agreement that they were abiding by and imposing a punishing “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign. Just like militarists in the United States, they’re likely to assume that weakness invites attacks. “I don’t think they want to provoke war, but they do want to send a signal that they’re prepared for it,” said Nasr.
Even if Iran were to somehow decide not to strike back at the United States, it’s still ramping up its nuclear program, and Trump has obliterated the possibility of a return to negotiations. “His maximum pressure policy has failed,” Nasr said of Trump. “He has only produced a more dangerous Iran.”
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Meanwhile, ISIS benefits from the breach between Iraq and America. “ISIS suicide and vehicle bombings have nearly stopped entirely,” said Brett McGurk, who until 2018 was special presidential envoy to the coalition fighting ISIS. “Only a few years ago, there were 50 per month, killing scores of Iraqis. That’s because of what we have done and continue to do. These networks will regenerate rapidly if we are forced to leave, and they will again turn their attention on the West.”
Unlike with North Korea, it’s difficult to imagine any photo op or exchange of love letters defusing the crisis the president has created. Most of this country has never accepted Trump, but over the past three years, many have gotten used to him, lulled into uneasy complacency by an establishment that has too often failed to treat him as a walking national emergency. Now the nightmare phase of the Trump presidency is here. The biggest surprise is that it took so long.
© 2020 The New York Times Company
Crisis mode:
Opinion
No One Believes Trump which is real bad in am international crisis
Jan. 7, 2020, 8:26 a.m. ET
I
This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.
“This is where having credibility — and having a president who didn’t lie about everything — would be really, really helpful,” Samantha Power, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, wrote recently.
A president with credibility would be better able to persuade foreign governments to help protect American diplomats and military members who are now at risk.
A president with credibility would be more likely to beat Iran in the global court of public opinion.
A president with credibility would be able to set clear red lines that might influence Iran’s behavior in coming weeks.
But President Trump has no credibility. His political rise was built on a lie (about Barack Obama’s birthplace). He has told thousands of untruths since becoming president. He appears to be lying again — about why he ordered the assassination of Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s most significant military leader.
Over the weekend, Senator Chris Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat, tweeted the following: “The moment we all feared is likely upon us.” Murphy was referring to Trump’s rash behavior. But Murphy just as easily could have been referring to Trump’s credibility. The United States has entered a serious national security conflict, and the whole world knows our president is a habitual liar.
For more …
Trump and his aides have said he ordered Suleimani’s killing to prevent an upcoming attack on Americans. But that explanation doesn’t make much sense on its face: How would the killing of a general stop an attack? Plus, as Slate’s Joshua Keating writes: “Subsequent reporting suggests there was no ticking bomb. The Soleimani strike was first raised not as a preventive measure, but as a response to an attack on a U.S. facility in Iraq that killed an American contractor a week earlier.”
Vanity Fair’s Abigail Tracy writes that though “the Washington defense and diplomatic communities are not exactly mourning the death of Qassim Suleimani, a powerful Iranian commander … there has been such an erosion in confidence, domestically and abroad, in not only what the Trump administration says but in its ability to construct a lucid foreign policy.”
“When someone has proven over and over again that they are not trustworthy, you can, and in important situations should, stop trusting them,” Vox’s Matt Yglesias writes. Yglesias adds: “Unfortunately, in the escalating crisis with Iran, many people [in the media] seem to have forgotten this basic principle.”
Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone, on Vice President Mike Pence’s claim that Suleimani supported the 9/11 hijackers: “The administration has provided no evidence that Suleimani personally assisted the transit of future 9/11 hijackers. And the formal investigation into the 9/11 attacks absolves Iran of fore-knowledge and operational involvement in the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.”
The Nightmare Stage of Trump’s Presidency
It’s Time to Calibrate Fears of a Cyberwar With Iran
© 2020 The New York Times Company
Reactions: Iran
Opinion
By killing Qassem Suleimani, Trump has achieved the impossible: uniting Iran
Dina Esfandiary
The national hero’s assassination has brought together Iran’s divided government and its exhausted and desperate public
Tue 7 Jan 2020 13.11 EST
For Iranians, the assassination of Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s notorious Quds force, was a profound upset. Suleimani was one of the most influential and powerful men in the Islamic Republic of Iran. He had more sway than the president, spoke to all the various factions, and had a direct line to the supreme leader. Most importantly, he was popular with the general public. One poll, taken as the fight against Islamic State raged, found that 73% of Iranians had a favourable opinion of him. Even so, the large crowds that have turned out on the streets of cities across the country have exceeded predictions. In a sense, though, the formidable show of unity is no surprise. Iran – like any other country – is proud, patriotic, and its people tend to put their differences aisde when faced with an outside enemy.
Iran: dozens dead in crush at Suleimani burial procession
Suleimani oversaw Iran’s regional policy, and as a result is regarded as having spent his lifetime defending his country. When Isis approached the Iranian border after taking over swaths of territory in neighbouring Iraq in 2014, the Quds force were at the forefront, representing the only country willing to commit boots on the ground in the fight to destroy the group. While many in the region viewed Suleimani as a deeply controversial figure, to put it mildly, a significant number of Iranians, Kurds and Iraqis saw him as having been pivotal in stopping Islamic State.
At home, this popularity cut across political lines. Becoming a battle hero is one way to win broad legitimacy, and so it has proved in death as in life. The killing of one of their country’s most senior officials is perceived by Iranians as a violation of sovereignty, and the rally-around-the-flag effect has been notable.
That doesn’t mean all Iranians condoned Suleimani’s actions abroad. In fact, for years people have been complaining about the extent to which the government has seemed to be occupied elsewhere, even as the internal situation deteriorated. In 2018, chants of “no to Gaza, no to Lebanon, I give my life for Iran” and “Leave Syria and think of us” echoed (not for the first time) at protests around the country. When economic times have been hard due to sanctions, both prior to the 2015 nuclear deal and today, Iranians find it difficult to understand why their rulers pour money into the region rather than using it in Iran.
Ordinary people continue to be squeezed by Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign, with no prospects for improvement. This, along with general discontent, led to significant protests in November 2019. These caught the government off guard, but didn’t prevent it swiftly crushing the demonstrations and enacting a nationwide ban on the internet that lasted five days. That response, unsurprisingly, further entrenched the discontent. Trump’s killing of Suleimani, however, has put those concerns on the back burner. Instead, Iranians have adopted a “better the devil you know” approach: unifying across the spectrum, even to the point of standing behind their government, in order to resist increasing US aggression.
And this means that, while Suleimani’s loss is a significant blow for Iran, the strike by the US was in one sense a gift to the Iranian government. It could never have dreamed of achieving such unity in difficult times otherwise.
The assassination has also had the effect of bringing together a divided elite, at least for the time being. Leading figures from the conservative and reformist camps spoke in unison, from the supreme leader, who vowed “revenge”, to the former presidential candidate and leader of the Green movement, Mehdi Karroubi, still under house arrest, who reportedly expressed his condolences. Even the former foreign minister of Iran under the shah, Ardeshir Zahedi, described Suleimani as a “patriotic and honorable soldier who was a son of Iran”.
The US withdrawal from the nuclear deal already meant that moderates had been forced to harden their positions. The Rouhani administration, for example, could no longer actively support dialogue with the US, instead cautiously calling for discussions on the condition that all sanctions were lifted beforehand. Today, even that position has become difficult. Who in the political establishment can expend political capital suggesting rapprochement with the US after what it has done and, importantly, after the level of public mourning? The answer is easy: no one.
With the killing of Suleimani, Trump has accomplished what no one in the Iranian elite thought possible: he has united a fractured, exhausted and desperate Iranian public in a show of unity.
And while these scenes are very far from an equivocal statement of support for the Islamic Republic, they are a resounding message to the world: Iranians will stand with their government in the face of external threats.
• Dina Esfandiary is a fellow at the Century Foundation and co-author of Triple-Axis: Iran’s Relations with Russia and China
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