[D66] The assassination of Qassem Suleimani

[A.OUT]

wsws.org:

The assassination of Qassem Suleimani and the criminalization of US 
state policy
13 January 2020

On Sunday, the New York Times published a detailed account, based on 
high-level sources within the US government, of the Trump 
administration’s decision to murder Iranian Gen. Qassem Suleimani on 
January 3, 2020.

The Times report makes clear that, far from being a spur-of-the-minute 
decision by Trump, the murder of Suleimani had broad support within the 
executive branch and the intelligence agencies, which had planned this 
crime for the past 18 months. The account implicates former National 
Security Adviser John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and CIA 
Director Gina Haspel in advocating and plotting the murder.

The Times report presents a picture of a criminal state, in which the 
most flagrant violations of the law are treated as routine. It is a 
testament to the degree to which US foreign policy has been criminalized 
after nearly two decades of the “war on terror.”

The article makes clear that the Trump administration’s motives for 
murdering Suleimani had nothing to do with a supposedly “imminent” 
threat, as claimed by White House officials. Rather, the United States 
wanted to retaliate against Suleimani for a series of US policy setbacks 
for which the American state held him responsible.

The Times writes:

     By the end of 2019, General Suleimani could boast of a number of 
Iranian accomplishments: [Syrian President] Mr. Assad, a longtime 
Iranian ally, was safely in power in Damascus, Syria’s capital, 
prevailing in a bloody, multifront, years long civil war and the Quds 
Force had a permanent presence on Israel’s frontier. A number of 
militias General Suleimani had helped foster were receiving salaries 
from the Iraqi government and exerting power in Iraq’s political system.

The Times continues, “For the past 18 months, officials said, there had 
been discussions about whether to target General Suleimani.”

It states:

     By the time tensions with Iran spiked in May with attacks on four 
oil tankers, John R. Bolton, then the president’s national security 
adviser, asked the military and intelligence agencies to produce new 
options to deter Iranian aggression. Among those presented to Mr. Bolton 
was killing General Suleimani and other leaders of the Revolutionary 
Guards. At that point, work to track General Suleimani’s travels grew 
more intense.

By September, the United States Central Command and Joint Special 
Operations Command were brought into the process to plan a possible 
operation.

Just days before he was killed, Suleimani met with Hezbollah leader 
Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon. Nasrallah warned him, according to the 
Times, “that the American news media was focusing on him and publishing 
his photograph.” The newspaper quotes Nasrallah as saying, “This was 
media and political preparation for his assassination.”

In the days leading up to the strike, CIA Director Gina Haspel advocated 
for the murder, according to the Times, arguing that “the consequences 
of not striking General Suleimani were more dangerous than waiting.” 
Haspel presided over a CIA “black site” torture facility under George W. 
Bush and was implicated in the destruction of CIA tapes of detainees 
being subjected to waterboarding.
CIA Director Gina Haspel arrives to conduct briefings for members of 
Congress on last week's assassination of Iran's senior military 
commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2020, on Capitol 
Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Among the most revealing elements of the report is the following 
sentence: “He [Trump] told some associates that he wanted to preserve 
the support of Republican hawks in the Senate in the coming impeachment 
trial.” In other words, if the Times’ account is true, domestic 
political calculations played a significant role in this crime.

Assassination violates the US Constitution and US law, as well as 
international law. The Bill of Rights specifically states, “No person 
shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process 
of law.”

In 1975, a Senate committee under Frank Church of Idaho exposed CIA 
assassination plots against a number of foreign leaders, forcing 
President Gerald Ford to sign Executive Order 11905, which declares, “No 
employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to 
engage in, political assassination.”

Suleimani was a high government official of a sovereign state. As a 
general he was a peer of American military leaders in the fight against 
ISIS. He was murdered in a third country, Iraq, while acting in an 
official capacity to meet with the Iraqi prime minister. This was a war 
crime and an act of war.

The Bush administration used the still-unexplained attacks of September 
11, 2001 to carry out a full-scale assault on democratic rights and 
international law. It created a system of mass warrantless domestic 
surveillance (in violation of the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment) and 
tortured thousands of people (in violation of the Eighth Amendment).

The United States illegally invaded Iraq in defiance of the United 
Nations, with United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan declaring, 
“From our point of view and the UN Charter point of view, it was illegal.”

The Obama administration expanded on the Bush administration’s crimes. 
It carried out more than 500 drone strikes throughout the Middle East 
and North Africa, with the body count in the thousands or tens of 
thousands. In a ritual known as “Terror Tuesdays,” Obama would 
personally pick the individuals to be blown to bits by drone-launched 
missiles.

Obama took the extraordinary step of assassinating an American citizen, 
Anwar al-Awlaki, followed by his son, a 16-year-old US citizen, two 
weeks later. At the time, Obama’s Justice Department asserted the right 
to kill US citizens, including within the borders of the United States.

With each killing, the stakes have been raised, with state murder 
playing a greater and greater role in the political life of the United 
States.

The contemporary form of “targeted killing” was pioneered by Israel. In 
the words of Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, “since World War II, 
Israel has used assassination and targeted killing more than any other 
country in the West.”

During the second Intifada in the early 2000s, the Israeli government 
routinely dispatched assassination squads or helicopter gunships to 
murder Palestinian activists and political figures.

A UN fact-finding commission concluded that the murders were “grave 
breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 147, and of 
international humanitarian law.” At that time, the US and its European 
allies distanced themselves from the Israeli murder policy.

While “some Bush administration officials have criticized the 
assassination squads,” Joe Biden, the “Democrats’ chief foreign-policy 
spokesman, has unambiguously defended the Israeli use of these 
extrajudicial assassinations,” noted the Middle East Policy Council.

Now, the practices of Israel—a pariah state from the standpoint of 
international law—have been adopted by the world’s leading “Western 
democracies.” Besides the United States, France and Britain both operate 
their own “kill lists.”

It should be noted that, despite criticisms of the expediency of killing 
Suleimani by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and others, no Republican 
or Democrat has publicly called the killing a crime or demanded that 
Trump be impeached or prosecuted for this grave violation of the 
American Constitution.

No one should believe that the open use of extrajudicial state killing 
will remain confined to regions outside the borders of the United 
States. Sooner or later, the United States will claim an “imminent 
threat” to murder one of its own citizens within its borders.

Under the pressure of endless, disastrous wars that have failed to 
reverse the decline in the global position of US imperialism, compounded 
by economic instability, soaring social inequality and the growth of the 
class struggle, the ruling class sees in the turn to open criminality 
the only means to secure its social and economic interests. What it 
fears most of all is the growth of mass popular opposition, to which it 
will respond with violence.

The murder of Qassem Suleimani has shown once again that there is no 
faction of either the Democratic or Republican parties that defends 
democratic rights. The defense of the most fundamental rights enumerated 
in the Constitution, and the defeat of the ruling-class drive for war 
and dictatorship, require the mass mobilization of the working class in 
opposition to the capitalist system that the Trump administration 
personifies.

Andre Damon