ArgumentSoleimani Strike Marks a Novel Shift in Targeted Killing, Dangerous to the Global Order

Published 8 January 2020

The 3 January drone strike against Qasem Soleimani marks a significant escalation in the U.S. use of force against external security threats as it has evolved in the years since September 11, 2001. Anthony Dworkin writes that there is nothing new or remarkable in a state carrying out the targeted killing of a military commander of another state in wartime, as the United States did in 1943 when it brought down the plane carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. But the attack against Yamamoto took place in the context of an all-out war between the United States and Japan, while the killing of Soleimani which ended with the complete surrender of Japan. looks less like a wartime military operation, and more like the targeted killings that the United States, Israel, and other countries have carried out to remove individual members of non-state groups.

The 3 January drone strike against Qasem Soleimani marks a significant escalation in the U.S. use of force against external security threats as it has evolved in the years since September 11, 2001. Anthony Dworkin writes in Just Security that President Donald Trump’s decision to target Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, brings the signature technique of the “war on terror” – the targeted killing of individuals outside any wider conventional military engagement – into the context of inter-state relations. “After a period when the United States used the analogy of inter-state war to expand its use of force against terrorist groups, this new development shows how the influence of the open-ended military campaign against al-Qaeda and the Islamic State is washing back into the inter-state realm, imperiling the line between war and peace.”

Dworkin notes that following al-Qaeda’s attack on the United States, President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama embraced the use of targeted killing against terrorist fighters overseas, striking members of al-Qaeda and other groups in countries like Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. “In doing so, they imported a ‘war paradigm’ into counterterrorism operations, claiming the right to target terrorists because of their status as members of an enemy force, as in an armed conflict with another state,” he writes, adding:

The barriers to the use of lethal force were reduced, as individual terrorists could be killed outside battlefield conditions and without showing they posed an imminent threat to life (though President Obama added a policy restriction in 2013 limiting strikes outside zones of hostilities to cases where targets posed a “continuing, imminent threat.”) The powers of a country at war were transposed into a context of individualized surveillance and targeting, expanding the notion of the battlefield in an unprecedented way.

The killing of Soleimani represents a converse and symmetrical development. With this action, President Trump has imported the kind of individualized targeting that has become associated with counterterrorism operations into the United States’ confrontation with another state.

There is nothing new or remarkable in a state carrying out the targeted killing of a military commander of another state in wartime, as the United States did in 1943 when it brought down the plane carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.

But the attack against Yamamoto took place in the context of an all-out war between the United States and Japan, which ended with the complete surrender of Japan. The killing of Soleimani thus looks less like a wartime military operation, and more like the targeted killings that the United States, Israel, and other countries have carried out to remove individual members of non-state groups.