Well, it appears that I was wrong when I said last night's attack would result in an inevitable US retaliatory strike. While he also announced further sanctions, called for greater NATO involvement in the ME, and has said the US is continuing to consider retaliatory actions,
President Trump has announced that there were no US or Iraqi casualties and that Iran appears to be backing down, which alongside further comments about the potential for US-Iranian cooperation against ISIS and that the US is "ready to embrace peace" seems to indicate that he will not escalate the crisis further by retaliating at this time.
There's a lot of speculation that the lack of lives lost in last night's attack
may have been intentional on Iran's part; their strikes on ARAMCO refineries in Saudi Arabia have proven that they can conduct cruise missile strikes with a high degree of accuracy, and their decision to not do so in this attack may have been motivated by a desire to satiate domestic demand for revenge (worth noting, Iranian government-controlled media continues to falsely claim that eighty or more US soldiers were killed) while at the same time not escalating the crisis into potentially uncontrollable levels. Similarly, President Trump focused on continued opposition to the Iranian nuclear program, the killing of Soleimani, and the lack of US lives lost to sort of spin it as a US victory. Seen a lot of comparisons to last year's India-Pakistan crisis, where both sides sort of spun a narrative that they were the real winners in the conflict while privately deescalating.
Mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, no American lives have been lost, Soleimani remains very dead, and the crisis seems to be over; on the other hand the decision to simply disregard an open attack on US military targets by another country, even if no lives were lost and little damage was done, makes me feel a bit eh - maybe I'm being irrational, I don't know - while the status of US troops in Iraq remains in question (whether they will be withdrawn/expelled or not, if Shiite militias might step up attacks against US targets, etc.)
