The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

The next day, in a Time magazine interview, Trump described the initial and most recent attacks as “very minor.”39 I wondered why I bothered coming to the West Wing every morning. This practically invited something more serious. Just as a starter on Wednesday, rockets were fired in Basra, likely by Shia militia groups, aimed at the local headquarters of three foreign oil companies (Exxon, Shell, and Eni), causing several injuries but no fatalities.40 The response of the Iraqi government was to announce a ban on attacks from its territory against foreign states.41 It would have been nice if Iraq treated Iranian military forces and Shia surrogates on its territory at least equally to the US, but that was impossible given Iran’s dominance in Baghdad. We refused to acknowledge this reality, even as it continued to expand, as it had been doing for several years. And a DC that morning produced no interest in responding to the rocket attacks. The IRGC’s new commander, Hossein Salami, and its Quds Force commander, Qassim Soleimani, had to be smiling broadly.