Pentagon officials have often offered improbable options to presidents to make other possibilities appear more palatable,” observed the New York Times on 4 January. That appears to have been the case following various Iranian provocations to the US. But Donald Trump seized on the most hard-line of the options presented to him: the killing of Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s top general. The president’s motives were almost certainly self-centred. Last October he had announced the US’s fatal strike on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of Islamic State, to great praise. Now he wanted a repeat of that and positive comparisons with a supposedly weak Barack Obama.
One man’s narcissism, in other words, triggered the events that followed: the US drone strike killing Soleimani on 3 January, the subsequent joy and fury across the Middle East, Iran’s retaliatory strike on US bases, the accidental Iranian missile attack on jet PS752 to Kiev and the deaths of the 176 people on board, and now the ensuing protests on Iranian streets. Can one apply the “law of unintended consequences” to a man with only a fleeting relationship with the concept of consequences?
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