A time for vigilante politics

What is remarkable about the elimination of the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qassem Soleimani is how little outrage it has inspired outside of Iran.

Would the US-ordered assassination of the ‘second most powerful man’ of a sovereign nation have been greeted with quite this degree of complacence – even glee – forty years ago? I doubt that it might have been this blatant.

Yes, such political assassination were common during the Cold War – but they were either all covert ops (like the CIA’s many unsuccessful attempts to kill Fidel Castro or Samora Machel’s mysterious air crash) or else achieved through engineering an uprising/war or stalemate that led to regime change (Lumumba, Allende etc). What Soleimani’s assassination in Baghdad illustrates is how ruthlessly pragmatic and devoid of legal limitation or moral principle international politics now is.

What the US did in the early hours of Friday the 3rd of January is basically what Israel has been doing for decades: they eliminated a person they considered a danger by killing them in a third country and claiming self-defence as a justification or reason. The Israelis marked out a number of PLO leaders and eliminated them super efficiently in third countries in the last decades of the twentieth century.

The Palestinian retaliation that followed (hijackings, suicide bombings, shelling etc) was then useful in justifying the self defence argument further and somehow added weight to their justification. At some point, the condemnation of the Israeli strikes died down and they began to be treated by the world’s media as acceptable and somehow even legal.

The so-called War on Terror following 9/11 fed into this line of reasoning: if you established (through whatever means) that a person or a country was terrorist or associated with terrorism, you had license to kill them. The hunt for Osama bin Laden and the eventual dramatic raid on his sheltering place in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad reinforced this view.

And when the US killed an American citizen (Anwar al Awlaki) in a drone strike in Yemen in 2014, the whole idea of national borders, sovereignty and citizenship was further eroded and the concept of international law and the rules of engagement in war was further weakened.

Just over a year ago the brutal murder of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul shocked the world. It is believed he was horribly tortured and the dead body chopped up. His remains have never been found. Five men involved in the killing were sentenced to death by a Saudi ‘court’. The orders for the killing are rumoured to have come straight from the top.

All the furore has now died down over the murder but it is worth recalling that President Trump was in any case reluctant to call the Saudis out over it. The situation now is that these sorts of hits appear to be an acceptable part of international politics and the use of this tactic has spread to other areas of conflict like Kashmir where the boast of ‘surgical strikes’ is likened to military efficiency and patriotism.

Iran is a sovereign country and you may or may not agree with its political or social direction, but as far as the US is concerned Iran has been feisty and has given as good as it has gotten because it has never not been a US target. For many in the Middle East it has represented a force that resisted US imperialism and expansionism, and for many Shia Muslims it represents a force that will always protect the religious sites (situated mostly in Iraq) and values of the Shias.

The US action has thrown open the door for tit for tat retaliation by Iran, but just imagine if a senior military commander and high-profile US general were eliminated by Iran in this manner – what would the world’s reaction be then?

Soleimani was part of the Iraqi security establishment fighting the vicious organization known as ISIL (which proclaimed itself a state presumably also to justify its actions and legality), and it is unclear what the US thinking on ISIL actually is – surely they are a greater enemy and a more serious threat to the world than Iran or Turkey?

A geopolitical nexus has mainstreamed the use of assassination as a means of eliminating opponents and critics. Is this what civilized states should do? What is international law all about and what is national sovereignty?

These sorts of target killings are what used to be the remit of mobsters or sinister covert agencies, but now it seems the fig leaf of legality and sovereignty and international law has been flung aside and what we have left is the idea that might is right and vigilante action is fine and good.

The writer is an independent journalist and a former BBC World Service producer and presenter.

Twitter: @umberkhairi