Hubris and Hostilities. The Death of Gen. Qasem Soleimani

Gen. Qasem Soleimani was a bolt and brave man.

The aptly named USAF MQ-9 Reaper.

Which doesn't make him somebody we should admire. 

Nathan Bedford Forrest was a brave and bold man, but he served an evil cause and went on to found the Klu Klux Klan.

Nathan Bedford Forrest

Joachim Pieper was a bold and brave man.  But he was a nasty Nazi as well.  His special SS commandos were responsible for the Malmady massacre, for example, the 75th anniversary of which was just passed.

Joachim Peiper

And indeed, both men are good comparisons in some ways.  They were radicals for causes they believed in deeply, and they were willing to die for them. They had personal bravery, an attribute we widely admire, and applied it in the service of causes we deeply oppose.

Soleimani has been an instrumental figure in Iranian proxy wars all over the Middle East.  A person cannot feel sorry for his death and he died the way that people who live the way he lived die.  He who lives by the sword, as St. Matthew noted, die by it.

Islam of course was spread by the sword and for a very, very, long time its two principal Middle Easter branches have contested it other in manners in which swords were occasionally drawn.  Iran, for its part, has had no problem whatsoever about violently spreading its Shiia theocracy's point of view violently from day one.

And hence the irony.  Soleimani had been allowed to do what he did, mostly because the West tolerated. There are certain rules to war, even dirty wars and proxy wars, and one of them is that you don't assassinate the uniformed general officers of your opponent.

Not that doing such is an illegitimate act of war.  Soleimani was a solders.  Killing soldiers is legitimate.  We've been at war in Iraq now for 20 years, attempting to prop up a government we installed while Iran attempts to completely co-opt it.  Iran has no right, or at least not any more right than we do, to have proxy armies in Iraq. At least we have a relationship with the legitimate government.  So Soleimani flying into the Baghdad airport was based on the assumption that his Western opponents would abide by the unwritten rule of not targeting the general officers of an opponent even if Iran itself has widely ignored the laws of war.

Apparently the current administration has determined that it won't abide by that rule.

Which brings us to this.

Nobody should weep for Soleimani.  Probably even Soleimani wouldn't want people to do that.  And he received a fate which, through is life, he had advocated for.

But now what?

Clearly, we're on to some sort of new stage in the long slow struggle with Iran.  Iran hasn't played by the written rules and now we're not playing by the unwritten ones.  Iran will be obligated to retaliate somehow, but in asymmetric war, they're uniquely exposed as a large established state.  Their ability to act as a sponsor of terrorism and proxy militias depended upon the grace of their opponents, which now seems to have been removed.  It will try to act, not doubt, but in doing so, it can no longer be certain of anything.

Still, the question remains.  What on earth was Soleimani thinking in pulling into an airport in a country where you are maintaining an illegitimate military effort?