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I think we all know the story by now.
Qassem Suleimani was one of the senior generals of the Iranian regime and commander of its Shia terrorist proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. He was ruthless and cruel and was finally killed in Iraq at the beginning of this year in a drone strike at Baghdad airport. Ostensibly on Trump’s order, through and above any due process by congress, and reportedly in retaliation for the attack on the US Embassy in Iraq.
The thing is, there are millions of people in the region who knew and dreaded his swift, cruel ruthlessness and disregard for innocents. Many would’ve lost family members to him and had good reason to rejoice at his death. His very removal from power itself prevents him ordering more deaths, and it seemed grossly unlikely we could’ve successfully arrested him in Iraq (and even if possible, some US soldiers were probably going to get killed in the attempt, and maybe the US has an obligation to only put its men in harm’s way if there’s no alternative. Putting them in harm’s way just to maintain a moral high ground probably wouldn’t sit right to the soldier’s families).
So why do I keep feeling uneasy at the killing of him?
Part of the issue is that it’s only in the context of a post-9/11 world that I became in favour, at least on paper, of Drone warfare against that particular enemy of Al-Qaeda. These were people who’s only ambition was to kill and die and take as many innocents with them as they could. Who used innocent human shields to their advantage, and as such maybe it was imperative they be taken out, and maybe this was the best way of doing so whilst utterly minimising any innocent collateral (obviously it’s not turned out that way, but I’m talking about how it seemed the rightest approach on paper). A corrective in a sense for that horrible day when we couldn’t save those trapped hostages, and the longer we waited to act, the worse things got.
But I think before then I would’ve opposed the idea of drone warfare. Of making the first strike and denying the enemy the chance to surrender or be taken alive. In some sense that was naïve of me. Giving the enemy a fighting chance can inevitably mean a chance for them to kill. But because this case doesn’t involve Al-Qaeda , it kind of makes me revert a bit to the old me’s position, or at least feel uncomfortable at how 9/11 changed me and my outlook and made me feel I had to think more ruthlessly.
The other uneasy feeling from this is that whilst Sulemani was a murderer, essentially it feels like he was killed for agitating a protest (albeit a violent and bloody one) at America’s presence in Iraq. Which is an incredibly chilling statement Trump seems to be making to the world.
It somehow can't help feeling that way.
There’s other reasons as well, which might be the closest insight into Corbyn’s world-view I’ve had of late.
The sense that had things been different for Iran (specifically if the US hadn’t been fucking with that country’s government for so long), Sulemani would’ve probably just been a menial worker and family man. The chaos and revolution in response to the imposed Shah, saw him make more ruthless choices and fall into a more ruthless role, embroiled in the horrid Darwinist sectarianism of the region. He was ruthless, but who’s to say that’s not in part because his surrounding enemies were too.
Ultimately this may sound hopelessly utopian, and he was responsible ultimately for his own actions. Obviously in some ways the chaos gave him opportunities to be his worst self, so it’d be off base to say he was a victim in some sense. The US did not remove that agency from him. But this gets somewhat into the fact that executing murderers may sound like the ultimate solution to eliminate them as a problem, but most countries in the middle east practice capital punishment, or in the case of Afghanistan have the rule of the lynch mob, and yet all it seems to have done is keep those populations in a state of arrested development, and done nothing to curb or subdue killer instincts in the people at all.
Ideally the reason we don’t have the ruthless capital punishments that Iran does, is because killing a murderer or gangster, in some ways kills with it the chance to learn what went wrong in their life, and how to create a society with preventative measures so that less people choose that way of life.
In a strange way, the drone strike on Suleimani crystalizes that for me. That he was a rotten man but also a product of a rotten state of the world that no-one’s really tried to fix. And the arbitrary manner in which he was killed shows there’s still no commitment to addressing that part of the world with anything but arbitrary brute force.
I scoffed when Corbyn said all this about Baghdadi. I still don’t shed tears for anyone who was part of Al-Qaeda or ISIS who’s been killed this way. Maybe it’s simply a case that I loathe them more, and was never given reason to loathe Suleimani equally (though clearly a lot of people in the region were, and who are we to tell them they shouldn’t?). But it is what is always dreaded about the Drone program. That it may start with dealing with the irredeemable Al-Qaeda/ISIS cases where an instant kill must be the first resort. But once the precedent’s set, that lethal creep can operate without accountability or responsibility, and it can be used more recklessly and stupidly to kill other enemies of the West like Qaddaffi and Suleimani, and damn the consequences. We saw the terrible consequences in Libya, and we might soon see them in Iran and Iraq too.
Qassem Suleimani was one of the senior generals of the Iranian regime and commander of its Shia terrorist proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. He was ruthless and cruel and was finally killed in Iraq at the beginning of this year in a drone strike at Baghdad airport. Ostensibly on Trump’s order, through and above any due process by congress, and reportedly in retaliation for the attack on the US Embassy in Iraq.
The thing is, there are millions of people in the region who knew and dreaded his swift, cruel ruthlessness and disregard for innocents. Many would’ve lost family members to him and had good reason to rejoice at his death. His very removal from power itself prevents him ordering more deaths, and it seemed grossly unlikely we could’ve successfully arrested him in Iraq (and even if possible, some US soldiers were probably going to get killed in the attempt, and maybe the US has an obligation to only put its men in harm’s way if there’s no alternative. Putting them in harm’s way just to maintain a moral high ground probably wouldn’t sit right to the soldier’s families).
So why do I keep feeling uneasy at the killing of him?
Part of the issue is that it’s only in the context of a post-9/11 world that I became in favour, at least on paper, of Drone warfare against that particular enemy of Al-Qaeda. These were people who’s only ambition was to kill and die and take as many innocents with them as they could. Who used innocent human shields to their advantage, and as such maybe it was imperative they be taken out, and maybe this was the best way of doing so whilst utterly minimising any innocent collateral (obviously it’s not turned out that way, but I’m talking about how it seemed the rightest approach on paper). A corrective in a sense for that horrible day when we couldn’t save those trapped hostages, and the longer we waited to act, the worse things got.
But I think before then I would’ve opposed the idea of drone warfare. Of making the first strike and denying the enemy the chance to surrender or be taken alive. In some sense that was naïve of me. Giving the enemy a fighting chance can inevitably mean a chance for them to kill. But because this case doesn’t involve Al-Qaeda , it kind of makes me revert a bit to the old me’s position, or at least feel uncomfortable at how 9/11 changed me and my outlook and made me feel I had to think more ruthlessly.
The other uneasy feeling from this is that whilst Sulemani was a murderer, essentially it feels like he was killed for agitating a protest (albeit a violent and bloody one) at America’s presence in Iraq. Which is an incredibly chilling statement Trump seems to be making to the world.
It somehow can't help feeling that way.
There’s other reasons as well, which might be the closest insight into Corbyn’s world-view I’ve had of late.
The sense that had things been different for Iran (specifically if the US hadn’t been fucking with that country’s government for so long), Sulemani would’ve probably just been a menial worker and family man. The chaos and revolution in response to the imposed Shah, saw him make more ruthless choices and fall into a more ruthless role, embroiled in the horrid Darwinist sectarianism of the region. He was ruthless, but who’s to say that’s not in part because his surrounding enemies were too.
Ultimately this may sound hopelessly utopian, and he was responsible ultimately for his own actions. Obviously in some ways the chaos gave him opportunities to be his worst self, so it’d be off base to say he was a victim in some sense. The US did not remove that agency from him. But this gets somewhat into the fact that executing murderers may sound like the ultimate solution to eliminate them as a problem, but most countries in the middle east practice capital punishment, or in the case of Afghanistan have the rule of the lynch mob, and yet all it seems to have done is keep those populations in a state of arrested development, and done nothing to curb or subdue killer instincts in the people at all.
Ideally the reason we don’t have the ruthless capital punishments that Iran does, is because killing a murderer or gangster, in some ways kills with it the chance to learn what went wrong in their life, and how to create a society with preventative measures so that less people choose that way of life.
In a strange way, the drone strike on Suleimani crystalizes that for me. That he was a rotten man but also a product of a rotten state of the world that no-one’s really tried to fix. And the arbitrary manner in which he was killed shows there’s still no commitment to addressing that part of the world with anything but arbitrary brute force.
I scoffed when Corbyn said all this about Baghdadi. I still don’t shed tears for anyone who was part of Al-Qaeda or ISIS who’s been killed this way. Maybe it’s simply a case that I loathe them more, and was never given reason to loathe Suleimani equally (though clearly a lot of people in the region were, and who are we to tell them they shouldn’t?). But it is what is always dreaded about the Drone program. That it may start with dealing with the irredeemable Al-Qaeda/ISIS cases where an instant kill must be the first resort. But once the precedent’s set, that lethal creep can operate without accountability or responsibility, and it can be used more recklessly and stupidly to kill other enemies of the West like Qaddaffi and Suleimani, and damn the consequences. We saw the terrible consequences in Libya, and we might soon see them in Iran and Iraq too.
