- The killing of General Qassem Soleimani Maximilian Popp, Spiegel
- The killing of General Qassem Soleimani Bozorgmehr & Cornish, FT
- The killing of General Qassem Soleimani Abhijnan Rej, Diplomat
- The killing of General Qassem Soleimani Jesse Johnson, Japan Times
“The Killing of Soleimani” was wasted on Trump bashing when it could have explored the expanding trend using anonymous drones/ missiles for assassinations… something Trump has picked up, but did not originate. Where will this convenient new tool find limits?
The legal question is, of course, an interesting one Jack, and the unsurprising response from the Left somehow left me…surprised.
Here’s why: a high-ranking General is dead. This general murdered anywhere from dozens to hundreds to possibly thousands of his own people. There’s a lot to digest in the Soleimani killing, but one of them that seems to be completely overlooked is this: a dead General is better than dead protesters.
Sure, Soleimani was a bad guy, and Washington is packed with bad guys, but what’s so bad about bad guys killing other bad guys, especially if most of the killing is done via clandestine, “surgical” operations? If the retaliation drags in non-military citizens, then we can worry about costs (remember the Nazis vs. Soviets?). But until then, I’m slightly okay with this assassination. In 2013-2014 I spent a bit of time here at NOL thinking through what a more libertarian military would look like. In short, I determined that it would be much, much smaller and more reliant on deadly precision technologies, special forces units, and clandestine operations.
There’s bad people in the world, and some of them deserve to die. And if their executioner happens to be another bad actor? Crocodile tears, though with reservations about the consequences.