US should retaliate inside Iran if American soldiers killed in Syria
Tom Rogan
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If Iranian operatives or proxies successfully kill American service personnel in Syria, President Joe Biden should order the U.S. military to retaliate against one or more targets inside Iran.
As the Washington Post reports, leaked U.S. intelligence reporting suggests that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps intends to use armor-piercing explosives to attack the U.S. military in Syria. The intelligence also suggests (credibly, considering Russia’s prior record) that Moscow and Tehran are cooperating to push the United States out of Syria.
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The Iranian threat is said to be centered on so-called explosively formed penetrator devices. EFPs essentially turn the cabins of armored vehicles into meat grinders. The IRGC used EFPs to kill hundreds of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and maim hundreds more. The IRGC unit responsible here is the same, which supervised the onslaught against U.S. forces in Iraq. And that’s the IRGC’s covert external action unit, the Quds Force. The Quds Force has also supervised numerous assassination plots against former Trump administration officials such as former national security adviser John Bolton and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Unfortunately, the Biden administration has done very little to effectively deter Iran from pursuing these and other plots.
That should change.
A senior Biden administration official, preferably the president himself, should make clear that any lethal attack on U.S. military forces in Syria will result in direct military retaliation against IRGC targets inside Iran. The objective of this threat would not be to precipitate a broader war but rather to reestablish a degree of deterrence. Ideologically vampiric in his view of American lives, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has had a particular blood lust for Americans since the January 2020 U.S. killing of former Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani. But Khamenei and the IRGC are ultimately rational actors. They will press as far as they can press before being bitten. If a major IRGC headquarters or training facility and its associated personnel are annihilated following an attack on U.S. personnel, Khamenei and the IRGC will reconsider future attacks.
Biden is right to retain a U.S. military presence in Syria. As commander in chief, he must also be ready to protect the lives of those under his command.