Conducting War

“The United States on Wednesday attributed the drone attack that killed three U.S. service members in Jordan to the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of Iran-backed militias, as President Joe Biden weighs his response options to the strike.” The response will likely be severe enough to send a clear message but contained enough to avoid a wider war. The whole incident might make you wonder: What the hell is Iran thinking? They’re loving the chaos and anti-America/Israel fervor in the region. But they certainly don’t want an all out war with the US. A reasonable follow-up question would be whether Iran is actually giving orders or if the terror groups they support are taking the initiative. Iran puts the bands together and provides the instruments. But are they always leading the orchestra? Arash Azizi in The Atlantic (Gift Article): Iran’s Proxies Are Out of Control. “The ideas of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s revolutionary leader, and Khamenei, its current leader, run deep in the Iraqi militias. But this ideological fervor makes them, ironically, hard for Tehran to control, because they are not always prone to be convinced by the strategic calculations of the Iranian establishment’s more pragmatic sections.”