Trump Threatens Iranian Cultural Sites, and Warns of Sanctions on Iraq

The president threatened Iran over potential retaliation for the death of a top general, and Iraq over the potential expulsion of United States troops.

"They're allowed to kill our people. They're allowed to torture and maim our people. They're allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people," President Trump said Sunday aboard Air Force One. "And we're not allowed to touch their cultural site? It doesn't work that way."Credit...Eric Thayer for The New York Times

By Maggie Haberman

Published Jan. 5, 2020Updated Jan. 7, 2020

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Sunday evening doubled down on his claim that he would target Iranian cultural sites if Iran retaliated for the targeted killing of one of its top generals, and threatened "very big sanctions" on Iraq if American troops are forced to leave the country.

Aboard Air Force One on his way back from his holiday trip to Florida, Mr. Trump reiterated to reporters the spirit of a Twitter post on Saturday, when he said the United States government had identified 52 sites for retaliation against Iran if there were a response to Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani's death. Some, he tweeted, were of "cultural" significance.

Such a move could be considered a war crime under international laws, but Mr. Trump said Sunday that he was undeterred.

"They're allowed to kill our people. They're allowed to torture and maim our people. They're allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people," the president said. "And we're not allowed to touch their cultural site? It doesn't work that way."

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The remarks came just hours after the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, walked back Mr. Trump's tweets and said that whatever was done in any military engagement with Iran would be within the bounds of the law.

Mr. Trump also sounded fatalistic about the possibility of an Iranian escalation.

"If it happens, it happens," he said. "If they do anything, there will be major retaliation"

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Listen to 'The Daily': The Assassination of General Qassim Suleimani

We piece together the events leading up to the killing of one of the most powerful operatives in the Middle East, a strike that has been called an act of war.

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Listen to 'The Daily': The Assassination of General Qassim Suleimani

Hosted by Michael Barbaro, produced by Alexandra Leigh Young and Rachel Quester, and edited by Lisa Tobin

We piece together the events leading up to the killing of one of the most powerful operatives in the Middle East, a strike that has been called an act of war.

michael barbaro: From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is "The Daily."

Today: From Iraq to Washington, consequences are mounting after the United States assassinated Iranian General Qassim Suleimani. Helene Cooper on why President Trump chose to do it. It's Monday, January 6.

Helene, what do we know about what led up to this extraordinary decision by the U.S. to take out General Suleimani?
helene cooper: Well, from what we've been able to piece together over the past few days, all of this started on December 27.
helene cooper: When an Iranian-backed Shiite militia group launched an attack in Iraq that ended up killing an American contractor.
helene cooper: Right after this happened, the Pentagon drew up the perennial list of options that the Defense Department is always keeping for the president to respond and decide what he's going to do in order to respond to the attack. General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper both flew to Mar-a-Lago, where President Trump was spending the holidays, and met with him, presenting him this list of how do you respond to what the administration immediately determined was an Iranian-backed attack. One option included striking Iranian ships. Another option was striking, perhaps, a missile site or two, or looking for a way to launch airstrikes against the Iranian-backed Shiite militias in Iraq that had started this. Also on the list was one extreme option, which was to launch an attack, which would really be a targeted assassination, actually, of General Qassim Suleimani, who is the head of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps's Quds Force, and it's basically Iran's very muscular, yet covert, arm of the Iranian military. He's, in essence, the most senior military commander in Iran. This is something that the Defense Department often does, is they will put an extreme option on the table because they will always give all options to the president, but it's almost their way of nudging the president toward an option that they prefer, right? If you put something that is viewed as a little bit crazy out there, then you get him to do what you want. President Trump, at the time, did not choose the nuclear option.
helene cooper: He went for, let's launch an attack on the Shiite militia group that launched the attack that killed the American contractor.
michael barbaro: So the president, in the end, chooses a pretty measured kind of tit-for-tat response. We were attacked by missiles, so we will attack with missiles.
helene cooper: Exactly, and we'll attack who attacked us.
michael barbaro: Got it.
helene cooper: So then, a couple of days later, President Trump is still at Mar-a-Lago, and he's watching TV. He's still angry about the initial Shiite militia attack that killed the American contractor, but now he's seeing, on TV, all of these video images of Iranian-backed protesters attacking the American Embassy in Baghdad.
helene cooper: And one of the first things that come to his mind is Benghazi and the attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi in 2011 that led to the death of four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya.
michael barbaro: Which was an attack of protesters —
helene cooper: Yes.
michael barbaro: — on an American, essentially, embassy-like building.
helene cooper: Yes.
helene cooper: President Trump, during his campaign, and for years after the initial attack in Benghazi, really went after Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time, for not doing enough to prevent that. And this had been a rallying cry during his 2016 campaign, so this was a pretty big deal for him.
helene cooper: So he's watching, now, these attacks that are happening under his own watch, and he's thinking about Benghazi, according to his aides that we talked to. He's also thinking about the 1979 attack on the American Embassy in Iran that led to the hostage crisis. He's getting more and more angry, according to his aides, and then he calls for his menu of options again, and this time, he picks the extreme option.
michael barbaro: And so this is the moment when the president calls for the strike on Suleimani, this top general.
helene cooper: That's right. Pentagon officials and administration officials were very surprised, because it's one thing to give an option to a president. It's another thing for him to actually do it. They had put that option on the menu for President Trump, not thinking that he would take it, and now he has taken it. So the Defense Department went into action. This is something that the American Defense Department, quite tragically, almost, is very good at doing. We know how to kill people, and we have been tracking, for more than a decade, almost two decades, Qassim Suleimani. So intelligence-wise, we had intelligence reports that he would be flying into Baghdad International Airport that night. There was some question now, as the military is setting up, just sort of the mechanics of how this strike is going to be conducted. The Pentagon had determined that, if he was met, for instance, by Iraqi officials who were friendly towards the United States, they would not go ahead with the strike. If he was not, they would. When General Suleimani's plane landed, he was met by the head of one of Iraq's Iranian-backed Shia militias, who was viewed by the United States as somebody who — I think the phrase they used was a "clean party," meaning it's O.K. to kill him. It's kind of a weird way of saying it.
michael barbaro: So a clean party means somebody we don't mind killing?
helene cooper: Exactly. Exactly. And so they authorized the strike and blew up the two-car convoy as it was leaving Baghdad International Airport.
michael barbaro: So help us to understand the significance of this decision by the president. Why was this ever an option given to him, even if it was the most extreme option? And why do we think he chose it?
helene cooper: It's hard to explain why President Trump chose to take this option. I think many of us don't understand it ourselves. The administration will tell you that he's a very bad guy, and there's no denying that. The administration will also tell you that he's responsible for the death of hundreds of American troops. That is true as well. The issue, though — that has been true for years and years, as American troops have battled some Iranian-backed Shia militias in Iraq, and both Presidents Bush and Obama made the decision not to kill Suleimani because he was a general with the Iranian military, and the United States traditionally does not go around assassinating military generals. The last time we did this was in 1943 during World War II, when we took out a Japanese admiral. Iran is a sovereign state. Assassinating one of their officials is pretty much almost the same thing as assassinating the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or a high-ranking American official, and then own up to it and take credit for it. It's just not something that is normally often done in broad daylight. But we should also remember that, just a month ago, President Trump authorized the killing of Baghdadi that ISIS had, and he got a lot of very good and deserved credit for that. The administration now, today, will try to make the equivalent that General Suleimani is the same as Baghdadi, that he's a terrorist, and he has certainly been behind many proxy terrorist acts by Iranian-backed groups in Yemen, in Lebanon, in Iraq and in Syria. So that has been increasing in recent months as the United States has choked off Iran economically.
helene cooper: That led the Iranian regime to start, as a lot of people at the Pentagon say, acting out, and you saw an increase in attacks from Iran, which has been punching out because it was being punched. And that is one of the reasons that the administration has now given for why this strike was taken. The other big reason, though, leads back to this, which is that the administration is saying that Suleimani was planning additional, even more high-profile attacks on the United States and on American interests and assets in the region, and that this was eminent.
helene cooper: You know, you're hearing that from General Milley, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. You heard that on Sunday from Secretary of State Pompeo.
helene cooper: Which is the argument that Suleimani was about to launch another imminent attack on American interests.
michael barbaro: Helene, of all the rationales that we've heard from the Trump administration, this seems to be the most important in terms of explaining why we would do this now, take out Suleimani. But of course, the U.S. has a very complicated history of using potential threats to American interests as a rationale for actions overseas, especially in the Middle East. So what does your reporting show about how we should be thinking about this explanation of an imminent attack?
helene cooper: That's such an interesting and key question, how we should be thinking about the administration rationale for this attack. Do we believe them, or do we not? Our reporting shows that it depends on where you stand. There is no question that General Suleimani has planned, and was continuing to plan, attacks against the United States through these groups, but that's been going on for more than 15 years. So the question then becomes, why now? The administration says there was something imminent and big that was about to happen, and they appear to be basing that on intelligence reports that they've received about General Suleimani's travels in the last few days leading up to the attack that took his life. But these same intel sources also say that he had been asked by Ayatollah Khamenei, who's the supreme leader of Iran, to come back to Iran, that Khomeini had not authorized anything. He had requested permission, and he was not given it, and he was told to come back to Iran. So that then belies the whole question of "imminent." Does it become something that is happening in two days, or something that hasn't even been approved yet? So what the administration, then, will have to answer to the American people, if this leads to war, which it might, is whether or not this assassination was worth it.
[music]
michael barbaro: We'll be right back.

Helene, what has been the response in the Middle East in the days since the U.S. killed Suleimani?
helene cooper: The response since the U.S. killed Suleimani in the Middle East has been huge.
helene cooper: In Iran, where protesters had, two weeks ago, been protesting against the regime, they had now united, apparently, behind the regime, and had turned their ire on the United States.
helene cooper: You're seeing these familiar views of American flags being burned in the streets.
helene cooper: This massive outpouring of mourners.

It's certainly ramped up the anti-American sentiment in Iran.
helene cooper: Meanwhile, in Baghdad, you're seeing similar outpourings of grief, but that's been accompanied by the Iraqi Parliament voting unanimously this morning to expel the United States from Iraq. They didn't put forth a timeline for withdrawal, so there's still some wiggle room there. But particularly the Shiites and the Iraqi government are very, very angry at the United States right now.
helene cooper: You have to understand that Iraq is made up of three very distinct groups — Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — but it is predominantly Shiite. Iran is Shiite as well, and the Iraqi government is very close to Iran. The Shiites in Iraq are particularly close to General Suleimani and view him, in many ways, as one of their own. They're also upset, though, because this was a targeted killing in their country. So in much the same way that if something like this happened in the United States, the United States government would be upset. That's another reason why the Iraqi government is so angry.
michael barbaro: Helene, can Iraq and its legislature do that? Can they kick the U.S. troops out of the country?
helene cooper: They can. Iraq can say, you are no longer welcome. Remember, we are there at the invitation of the Iraqi government, ostensibly to fight the Islamic State. That battle is largely over. So yes, the Iraqi government can kick the United States military out of Iraq. Whether they do or not, whether this is posturing, I don't know yet. Every couple of hours, you see something else. Right after the Iraqi Parliament voted, we saw the Pentagon announced that it was suspending the anti-ISIS coalition effort in Iraq. There are 4,000 American troops who've been there, and that the troops who are in Iraq will be focused on protecting the American citizens who are still in the country, but who are being advised to leave as soon as possible. It's like 2013 all over again, when the Obama administration ended combat and pulled troops out of Iraq. And you saw the rise of ISIS because once the United States is gone and out of the country, these other factions are given more room to maneuver and more room to thrive. And so you can see how these events could lead to a resurgence of ISIS if the ground becomes clear for them to move around more freely.
michael barbaro: And wasn't Suleimani also leading an Iranian militia that was an enemy of ISIS?
helene cooper: Yes, there was a de facto cooperation between Suleimani and the United States in the fight against ISIS. They were both opposed to ISIS, and they were both fighting ISIS on the same turf.
michael barbaro: Right, which would have made, in a very narrow and complicated way, Suleimani an ally in our fight against ISIS, even though he's our enemy in many other respects.
helene cooper: He was an ally in our fight against ISIS. That is correct.
[music]
michael barbaro: Helene, the ripple effects of all this are very complicated, but I wonder if there's a simple way of thinking about this, which is that after all these months of provocation and response between the U.S. and Iran, that President Trump felt it was time for the U.S. to remind Iran that, at the end of the day, we are the military superpower, and our advantages over them are extraordinary and represent the kind of deterrent that means, whatever Iran's ultimate response to this is, it will not be all that severe — that, in a sense, we just called Iran's bluff.
helene cooper: That would work if we hadn't started this to begin with by pulling out of the Iranian nuclear deal, which was signed in 2015 under the Obama administration, and which was hated by President Trump and many Republicans.
helene cooper: They viewed it as too weak, and said that it gave Iran rewards, as it did, by lifting sanctions for stopping their uranium enrichment, but did not address Iran's misbehavior, and this is the General Suleimani-type misbehavior, in other areas.
helene cooper: When we pulled out of the nuclear deal, we reimposed sanctions on Iran, and put even stiffer sanctions on the country. We started to punish companies and basically told the world, you either do business with Iran, or you do business with America. And of course, most of the world chose America. That had the result of completely putting a strangle on the Iranian economy, and that is kind of what has led to the Iranian regime then starting escalating attacks against the United States, because this is a hard-line regime, and they clearly believe that if they're hurting, they're going to pull the United States down into the mud with them.
michael barbaro: But doesn't it still stand to reason that if that is the situation that we are in, in a post-nuclear deal world, where Iran decides that the only way that it can operate is with attacks through militias that it organizes against the U.S., that taking out a person like Suleimani is a reasonable option, given our superiority over Iran? We have nuclear weapons. They do not. We have superpower military capabilities. They do not. That doesn't leave them with a whole lot of options. Does it?
helene cooper: Back in the '80s, there was this tanker war, where Iran, Iraq and the U.S. were all going after each other. And they made the Persian Gulf an impossible place, and the price of oil went way up. And it ended up with the United States, by mistake, shooting down an Iranian passenger jet. And Iran made a lot of noise after that happened, and then they quieted down. So there is precedent for that, but I think it's easily as much of a chance that they don't quiet. Iran has a whole lot of options to make us hurt. Certainly, the United States is much better equipped, but unless we're actually suggesting that we're going to drop a nuclear bomb on downtown Tehran, it's never that easy once you get into a conventional war. So we went to war in Iraq, which lasted years, and which we are still seeing some of the consequences from. A war with Iran would be so much worse than any kind of war with Iraq. They're way more sophisticated than Iraq ever was. They have the ability to make it hurt. So the question can be phrased as, is the United States willing to give up the blood and treasure it would take to subdue Iran? Which of course, it could, but it's going to cost us something. So are we willing to pay that fee?
[music]
michael barbaro: Helene, thank you. Thank you for talking to us on a Sunday. Thank you.
helene cooper: Thank you, Michael.
michael barbaro: For everything. We appreciate it.
helene cooper: All right, bye-bye.
michael barbaro: On Sunday, Iran's leaders and their allies began to openly discuss plans for retaliation against the United States, saying that they would target America's military bases and its soldiers. In an interview with CNN, a high-level adviser to Iran's supreme leader said, quote, "The only thing that can end this period of war is for the Americans to receive a blow that is equal to the blow that they have inflicted." On Twitter, President Trump warned Iran against such a response, writing, quote, "They attacked us, & we hit back. If they attack again, which I would strongly advise them not to do, we will hit them harder than they have ever been hit before!"

We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today.
michael barbaro: In interviews on Sunday, the leading Democratic candidates for president, including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Mayor Pete Buttigieg, on CNN, challenged the Trump administration's rationale for killing General Suleimani and predicted that it could backfire on the U.S.
michael barbaro: In a statement, former Vice President Joe Biden said that the president, quote, "just tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox," and Senator Bernie Sanders, at a campaign stop, accused the president of violating his campaign pledge.
michael barbaro: And Australia's government said that it would deploy the country's military to fight a set of catastrophic fires that have already burned more than 12 million acres, an area larger than Switzerland, killed at least 24 people, and killed or injured hundreds of millions of animals. The Times reports that the fires are now so large and hot that they are creating their own weather patterns, further fueling the blazes. That's it for "The Daily." I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

As the president spoke, six advisers crowded to the side of Mr. Trump's desk in the cabin, near the doorway: Robert O'Brien, his national security adviser; Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser; Ivanka Trump, his daughter and senior adviser; Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff; Hogan Gidley, a deputy press secretary; and Dan Scavino, the White House social media director. The president had a football game on the television affixed to the wall.

Mr. Trump also vowed to impose sanctions on Iraq if a move to evict American military personnel from the country takes place, a possibility heightened by the Iraqi Parliament's passage Sunday of a measure to expel foreign troops in response to the killing of General Suleimani. That strike took place in Iraq, in a move that officials saw as violating the country's sovereignty.

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"We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that's there," Mr. Trump said of Iraq. "It cost billions of dollars to build. Long before my time. We're not leaving unless they pay us back for it."

Mr. Trump then escalated his language, saying: "If they do ask us to leave, if we don't do it in a very friendly basis, we will charge them sanctions like they've never seen before ever. It'll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame."

"If there's any hostility, that they do anything we think is inappropriate, we are going to put sanctions on Iraq, very big sanctions on Iraq," Mr. Trump added.

In making his warning, the president was threatening sanctions on a country for forcing out American troops whom he himself had pledged to bring home during his 2016 presidential campaign.

The threat also underscored the growing fallout from the president's decision regarding General Suleimani.

The president said in tweets and in a statement on Friday about the strike that General Suleimani's "reign of terror" was over, and he spoke about the hundreds of deaths for which the commander was responsible.

Officials have said the United States was retaliating against Iran, first for the death of an American contractor, and then for attacks at the American Embassy in Iraq led by pro-Iranian forces.

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Officials have also said they had intelligence that General Suleimani was involved in planning "imminent" attacks on American interests in other countries, a statement that some government officials have questioned.

Mr. Trump told reporters that he might discuss making some of the intelligence available to a skeptical public nearly 17 years after the war in Iraq began on the basis of intelligence that proved not to be credible.

Mr. Trump also insisted he had been personally tracking General Suleimani for about 18 months. "He was leading his country down a very bad, dangerous path," he said.

Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent. She joined The Times in 2015 as a campaign correspondent and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald Trump's advisers and their connections to Russia. Previously, she worked at Politico, The New York Post and The New York Daily News. @maggieNYT

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 6, 2020, Section A, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: President Repeats Threat To Target Cultural Sites. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe