Iran is in shock. The funeral procession for Qassem Soleimani, who was seen as an undefeatable "living martyr" and who has now been raised to the status of national hero, will continue for three days until they reach Kerman, his home town. When the convoy reaches Tehran on Sunday, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who is said to have loved Soleimani like a son and fingered him as the next president, will weep over his coffin.
Khamenei was very wrong about Trump when he assumed that the US would not dare to order the assassination of such a high-ranking Iranian official. He was so wrong that he even started to mock the president, saying that he was "incapable of doing anything," which is how he responded last week to Trump's warning that he would not ignore the attack on an American-Iraqi base in Kirkuk, which killed an American defense contractor. The president, as we know, doesn't like being made fun of.
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Even Soleimani, drunk with power, which caused him to take his personal security too lightly, publicly mocked Trump. When the president warned that anyone who attacked Americans would "suffer consequences the like of which few throughout history ever have," Soleimani responded that Iran was in charge of the region and "close to you in that place you don't think we are."
The three missiles fired by an American drone early Friday morning at his car distanced Soleimani from Trump and brought him closer to his God. But he was right about one thing: Iran's geographical proximity to thousands of American soldiers deployed in the region and to American military bases, shipping vessels, and other US targets in the Middle East provide Tehran with a rich bank of targets against which to exercise its commitment to harshly avenging Soleimani's death.
It would appear that Iraq is where Iran would prefer to carry out its revenge, and not only because it is where Soleimani launched his project to oust US forces by shooting rockets at bases in Iraq that house US forces. Another consideration is that the pro-Iranian militias which Soleimani founded in Iraqi territory take instructions from Tehran and are willing to rush into combat, especially when one of their top commanders Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, was killed along with Soleimani and a few other militia members at the Baghdad airport.
But to carry out an attack on US targets, Iran can also use any of its other proxies throughout the Middle East – in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, or even farther abroad. The only reported attempt Iran has made thus far to operate inside the US, when it intended to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington, failed.
This weekend, Iran was sending signals that it would not rush to respond to Soleimani's killing and would opt for "an appropriate time and place." We can assume that its main problem in planning its revenge has to do less selecting a fitting target and more with a desire to ensure that it any action will be seen as "fitting revenge" while not develop into a full-scale war with the US, which Iran does not want.
What makes Tehran's impending decision even more complicated is the unpredictable nature of the US president, who is heading into an election year. Will he be willing to overlook a painful but "proportional" act of revenge by Iran, or will he give orders to bomb Iran's oil or nuclear facilities?
Amid the cries for revenge in Tehran, Israel is also being mentioned as a "partner in the terrible crime." For what it's worth, Israel is not high on the list of possible targets the Iranians could use to get even for Soleimani's assassination.
On the other hand, we can admit freely that the hit on Soleimani, who was behind Iran's terrorist activity abroad, has eliminated one of Israel's most dangerous enemies in the "war between wars" it is waging against Iran. Soleimani personally took care to bolster the threat Hezbollah poses to Israel's north, as well as up the level of terrorism from Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the south. He completed the encirclement by moving the Shiite militias in Syria to the Golan Heights. His successor, Gen. Esmail Ghaani, will aim to follow in Soleimani's footsteps, but he will need to put in a lot of work to secure the eminence and father-like backing from Iran's supreme leader that his predecessor enjoyed. It's not certain he will succeed.
