Gerard Baker in the Times adds his voice to the debate, defending Trump against accusations that he was guilty of acting impulsively and cynically. On the contrary, The killing of Qasem Soleimani made perfect sense:
The killing of Soleimani wasn’t some impulsive act of bloodlust. It was rather a high-stakes gamble, a move that (if it pays off) has the potential to reshape the geopolitical order in the Middle East. If — a big if — Mr Trump has the patience and commitment to follow it through, it offers a path to a new strategic balance in a region that has been in almost continuous turmoil since the turn of the century.
There are a number of tendentious fictions around Soleimani’s killing. The first is that this was a lawless political assassination, betraying a typical Hollywood-like fixation on “getting the bad guys”. That Soleimani was a figure of political standing does not render him immune from accountability for his long reign of terror. But this wasn’t simply a case of retributive justice. This was no Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who were all essentially busted flushes when they met justice. Soleimani was the mastermind of a vast programme of slaughter, enslavement and repression that was continuing across the Middle East until the day he died. In Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Gulf and almost certainly against his own people in Iran, Soleimani’s leadership and battlefield decision-making made him a legitimate target for any power seeking to restrain Iran. That’s not to say the general’s killing eliminates the threat. But it surely disrupts, impedes and perhaps reduces it.
The second fiction is that this was a reckless move that will trigger attacks on US forces and allies in the region and perhaps elsewhere. This is less a fiction than a wilful refusal to acknowledge what has been going on for a year. US and allied forces have been attacked repeatedly — from strikes on shipping in the Gulf to the shooting down of a US drone, to missiles fired at Saudi oil facilities and the targeting of Americans on Iraqi bases. There have been 13 attacks on facilities that house US troops in Iraq in three months, almost all carried out by Kataeb Hezbollah, the paramilitary organisation supplied by Soleimani’s Quds force.
A US reprisal was overdue. “It’s never a good thing to have your adversary think he can kill Americans and there won’t be a response,” said Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA Middle East case officer and now a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
A third fiction is that this is all just a cynical attempt by Mr Trump to divert attention from impeachment troubles at home. This is not only the sort of tediously predictable thing that has been said of every US military operation since the Barbary pirates, it’s a bad misreading of American politics. The idea that Mr Trump needs a distraction may be the opposite of the truth. Since the impeachment proceedings began in late October his approval ratings have risen — according to the Real Clear Politics average, from below 42 per cent to above 45 per cent. The prospect of impeachment has galvanised his supporters even more than his opponents.
The fourth fiction is the largest and most damaging: that this was a strategically vacuous act, an impulsive hit with no thought for the wider context. You can question the wisdom of Mr Trump’s action but here’s the actual strategic picture. In 2015 President Obama, backed by governments in Europe, China and Russia, did a deal with Iran in which the US essentially said to the state: “You can do what you like in the region as long as you give up, or at least defer for a while, your nuclear ambitions.” That was a strategic gamble by Mr Obama far bolder and riskier than anything Mr Trump did last week. The consequences have been clear. Iran has used revenues from oil exports freed up by the removal of the embargo to advance its regional ambitions. At the very least, the killing of Soleimani tells Iran that the US is no longer prepared to accept this strategic fait accompli.
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