State Sponsored Assassination (By Us)

There's a reason that assassination isn't the preferred tool of warfare. Rather than serving as a warning, it more often functions as a provocation, making things worse. Despite the claims from the White House that the assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani will make Americans safer, it is likely to be used as a pretext for Iranian action against American targets. If our people are so safe, why are Americans being urged to immediately leave Iraq?

One of the figures that I have heard quoted without question since yesterday is that Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of over 600 American & coalition service members. What is this based upon? What is the source? What were the circumstances? It is suggested that these deaths were indirectly caused by Soleimani, carried out be Iranian supported Iraqi militias. When did this take place? I have a hard time trusting anything that the serial liar in the White House tells us and I haven't seen any independent sourcing for these claims.

One of things that I learned via some Google searches this morning was that Soleimani's Quds Force was fighting to defeat ISIL even as we were. Along with the Kurdish militias, the Iranians apparently provided a lot of the ground troops while we provided air cover and aerial bombing. I guess when he was doing the hard work of destroying the ISIL caliphate wasn't the right time to assassinate him.

Assassination.

We didn't kill him on the field of battle. There wasn't even a battle. Assassinating a high ranking official of another nation, especially one that we are not at war with, is in itself an act of war. Congress, not the President, has the authority and responsibility to declare war. The president, in his role as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, has the authority and responsibility to direct and allocate the actions of those armed forces, but not to unilaterally declare another country as an enemy and launch an attack, other than in self-defense.

Of course, Trump has set the groundwork for this action. First, he declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, which the Quds Force is part of, was declared a terrorist organization, the first time an arm of a foreign government was so designated. Second, Trump has been characterizing the very existence of Quds Force as a threat that needed to be defended against. Preemptive attacks are not defensive, but offensive.

No one, literally no one, is saying that Soleimani was a good guy, however, he was not a rogue actor, but the representative of a sovereign nation. And Iran, that sovereign nation, is not going to sit by as we assassinate their people. I seriously doubt that Trump has thought through the repercussions of this action.