Former US policy officials divided on impact of US airstrike

Former US diplomats and policy specialists said Friday that the US airstrike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad eliminated a major sponsor of fatal attacks on Americans but also raised the prospect of a wider war in the region.

Among those commenting publicly was former US Ambassador Nicholas Burns, a current faculty member at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who tweeted late Thursday that the the strike will provoke “inevitable counter attacks” against American personnel, and that President Trump must publicly explain his strategy for containing Iran going forward.

In a follow-up e-mail, Burns, a career diplomat and former under secretary of state, wrote that the Iranians “and their Iraqi shia militant allies have been targeting the U.S. for months now. As you know, they killed an American contractor last week. Soleimani himself is responsible for hundreds of American deaths over the last three decades. They launched a violent attack on our embassy in Baghdad just a few days ago.”

Burns added that if the Trump Administration “believed further attacks on our embassies in Iraq and the region were imminent, it had a legitimate reason to attack Soliemani. We should have no sympathy for him. He was the major force for terrorism in the Middle East.”