US Foreign Policy by Assassination

Shared by Ray McGovern, on Facebook:
January 4, 2020
by Graham E. Fuller • Blog •

US Foreign Policy by Assassination

Graham E. Fuller (grahamefuller.com)

4 January 2020

The United States, through its assassination of top-ranking Iranian General Qasim Soleimani, has once again opened Pandora’s box in its conduct of foreign policy. How long does Washington think it can enjoy unique monopoly over exercise of these forms of international violence before they are turned against us? For a brief period we had a monopoly on the use of military use of drones—now everybody is doing it and the US can now fall victim as readily as it uses them against others. Ditto for cyberattacks, pioneered by the US, but now a weapon at the disposal of any number of middle sized countries.

Assassination is not, of course, a new tactic in the annals of wartime. In what technically we must call “peace-time”—despite the many wars the US has going at the moment—assassination is a dangerous tool, especially when used in the conduct of foreign policy against top-ranking foreign officials. General Soleimani was not just the commander of al-Quds military forces. Far more accurately he should be considered the number two figure of importance in the entire Iranian ruling structure, and perhaps the most popular political/military figure in Iran. Or he could be likened to a National Security Adviser in the US, or to a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, or any number of US regional commanders put together. Mark you, this was a blatantly political assassination, and, in the calculations of most practitioners of international law it was an act of war. One can only imagine the US response to a similar Iranian assassination of a top US regional commander.

That General Soleimani was a formidable opponent of the US is beyond question. His strategy, tactics and policies ran circles around the leaden and ill-conceived policies and leaders of the US war in Iraq—still ongoing 17 years later and that has already cost the US dearly in its feckless goal to dominate and master Iraq. The US has long since lost the geopolitical lead in the Middle East as a whole—going back decades.

The trembling puffery and outrage on the part of most politicians and commentators in the US that “Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of any number of American soldiers in Iraq” reflects either childish naivete or massive self-delusion about what the nature of war is all about. Iran knew it was in the US neocon cross-hairs when the US invaded Iraq in 2003; the standing joke in the US then was that war with Iraq is fine, but “real men go to war with Iran.” The US had fully supported Saddam Hussein’s vicious war against Iran throughout the 1980s. It was not surprising then that Iran aided the massive uprising of Iraqi Sunni and Shi’a forces to resist the US military invasion and occupation of Iraq—a presence that lacked any legal standing. Naturally Iran provided advice and weapons to Iraqi guerrillas to facilitate killing the soldiers of the American occupation, that’s what war is. The US has supported any number of guerrilla forces around the world to fight against enemies and regimes we don’t like, starting with military aid, training, intelligence, joint missions, etc., as we have seen most recently in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. There is precious little ground for US moral outrage in all of this—unless one simply assumes, as the US usually does—that America by definition represents the “moral cause,” the “good guys,” and has a god-given right to intervene anywhere and everywhere in the name of freedom, democracy or human rights or to protect whatever it is.

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