March 26, 2021
A regime debate over how to retaliate for the US assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleymani seems to have been settled with the regime deciding it would take no retaliatory action against the Americans.
That signal came February 27 when Ali Kadkhodai, the spokesman for the Guardian Council, announced that the ideal punishment for the Americans is to expel them from the Middle East.
Assuming Kadkhodai was speaking for the 12-man Council as a whole, that would mean those senior figures, including the body’s leader, Abbas Janati, an extreme right-winger, have decided any response that included killing Americans would be too big a risk for the Islamic Republic and might cause a war with the United States.
The Council of Guardians is the latest and most important of many groups that have recently been declaring the expulsion of the Americans from the Middle East is the most appropriate response to the assassination.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi last year declared the expulsion of the Americans to be an Iranian goal. But he didn’t link it to Soleymani’s killing.
In the last several weeks, after hardliners began pressing for a bloody response, senior officials have started lining up and saying there is no American whose murder would be a suitable equivalent for the murder of the general. That has started the growing number of officials saying expulsion is the only suitable response.
The debate went on all through December as the hardline pressure for a violent response on the first anniversary of the assassination, January 3, grew louder and louder. Nothing happened on January 3. And the public clamor for violent action, much of it from the Pasdaran, immediately died.
On the day of the anniversary, the spokesman for the Pasdaran, Brig. Gen. Ramazan Sharif, rather weakly argued that the long delay in retaliating was a response in and of itself. “While the US is waiting to see Iran avenge the assassination of General Soleymani, it is sick and tired of remaining on standby,” he argued, as if being on standby somehow drained and weakened the US armed forces.
More and more groups are lining up to say the best response for Soleymani’s death is the expulsion of the Americans from the region. With the Guardian Council now joining the refrain, the one major voice that has not spoken is that of the Supreme Leader himself.