Give you a little of my perspective on Iran.
Both in Afghanistan and the ME deployments I was in o
perational and strategic units, albeit the unit I was with in Iraq was technically a tactical unit, but for operational/strategic purposes. One of the critical strategic objectives was to identify and assess Iranian subversive threats.
It is well known Iran facilitated operations in Kandahar, Afghanistan, frequently. Same in north east, and eastern Iraq. In Iraq, they were not as effective in the NE, due to the kurds.
To be honest, I never really understood Iranian objectives for doing this stuff, and we (as in, coalition forces) mostly ignored it, we just wanted to know if we get intelligence indicating critical threats, which the scale of the subversive acts never even reached the type of stuff going on now, and almost assuredly the Iranian activities had something to do with gaining attention. That changed this week.
They poked the bear, for the umpteenth time, and the bear slapped the **** out of them. The issue now is, Iranian folks have infiltrated the Iraqi "government", and no one really knows how crazy Iran is. We ****ed up going there, and we ****ed up leaving.
The Soleimani killing is a pretty big message to Iran, and it's saying they need to chill the **** out.
Last edited by itshotinvegas; 01-02-2020 at 11:30 PM.