Via the Chicago Tribune that Citizen Free Press pointed me to is an odd (to me) statement:
Trump’s decision to kill Soleimani was one that Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama had rejected, fearing it would lead to war
I don’t understand. We already were at war in Iraq and we already had huge dislike for Iran. So... what were they afraid of?
I see what you did there.
We needed over 100k troops to invade the smaller and flatter Iraq. Iran is bigger and much more mountainous, like a super-sized version of Afghanistan. Much harder to invade. We'd need at bare minimum 400k troops to invade Iran. Not only is the Iranian army big with 1+ million troops, they would be damn near impossible to clear out of every mountain range. So a war involving us invading Iran is out, especially when we had so many troops tied up for so long in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan.
That leaves the terrorists and proxy wars that Iran sponsored. And they sponsor a metric shit ton of them. Paid for by the sale of oil and natural gas to our NATO "allies" in Europe. Now that they've decided to suck on Putin's dick to get those thick dark loads of creamy oil they need, only Turkey remains as Iran's biggest NATO customer, with 44% of Turkey's oil supply coming from Iran.
So if 43 and 44 had acted against Iran, our NATO "allies" would have been plunged into an energy crisis. If they had acted against one of the terrorist cells that Iran sponsored, they all would have put Europe in their sights. Because 43 and 44 didn't have the balls to say Fuck NATO and Fuck Europe, our troops are the ones that bled and died so that Europe could be our economic competitors.
Foreign relations is always a scary risk.... when you are a coward or a traitor.