ArgumentThe Age of Open Assassination
In killing Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force, with an MQ-9 Reaper drone, the United States openly targeted a senior official of a sovereign nation-state, carrying out a satisfying act of short-term revenge but undermining its long-term strategic interests. We are in a dangerous period: “Revenge is an ungovernable impulse that easily spirals out of control,” Audrey Kurth Cronin writes. “U.S. policymakers must resist the temptation to use their technological and military prowess to target senior government officials, remembering who is watching and learning from what they do.”
In killing Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force, with an MQ-9 Reaper drone, the United States openly targeted a senior official of a sovereign nation-state, carrying out a satisfying act of short-term revenge but undermining its long-term strategic interests. Audrey Kurth Cronin writes in Lawfare that the United States had long been capable of killing him and, since at least 2007, had abundant reasons and numerous opportunities to do so,
But Soleimani was a prominent senior Iranian leader, the United States was not at war with Iran, and past U.S. military and civilian decision-makers had declined to kill him. Legal arguments defending or critiquing the Jan. 3 killing take a narrow approach to the historic implications of the event: The hit on Soleimani demonstrates that we are in a destabilizing era of open assassination.
In the short term, the United States and its allies are better off without Soleimani. There is no doubt that he was a heinous enemy, plotting against American citizens just as he had done for years. There is no question that Soleimani had the blood of American soldiers on his hands—from during the U.S. military occupation of Iraq, the fight against the Islamic State, and the ongoing struggle over Iraq’s political future. There is no denying that the Iranians will miss his brilliant tactical maneuvering, which has been partly responsible for the dramatic growth of Iranian influence over the past two decades. Focusing on the advantages of his death, though, ignores the global history of assassinations; the current increase in their use; the new technologies that equalize the ability to target individuals; and the second-, third-, and fourth-order effects that will kill more Americans (and vital allies) in the future.
We are in a dangerous period: “Revenge is an ungovernable impulse that easily spirals out of control,” Cronin writes. “U.S. policymakers must resist the temptation to use their technological and military prowess to target senior government officials, remembering who is watching and learning from what they do.”
