Think the recent round of U.S.-Iran tensions died with the killing of Tehran’s top general, Qasem Soleimani? Think again. Once again, a rocket attack attributed to an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq has killed two American troops and one British service member. And once again, the U.S. has carried out an airstrike on the same militia it says was behind both the recent attack and the one that led to a burst of rocket attacks in late December and early January. So are we headed for another clash with the Islamic Republic?
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It takes two, baby: The conventional wisdom after the U.S. strike against Qasem Soleimani was that Iran’s ballistic missile attack on an Iraqi base housing American troops represented the sum total of the Islamic Republic’s willingness to retaliate for the death of one of its most powerful generals—particularly after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shot down a civilian airliner, provoking mass outrage and diminishing some of the national unity built up in the wake of Soleimani’s death.