By Majid Kamrani
It is about three years since former United States President, Donald Trump, ordered the cold-blooded assassination of a former top actor of another state on the street. Major General Qassem Solemaini was not a shadowy chief of a murderous extremist band or the boss of a violent drug cartel, not even a commander of a rebel army or a rogue general on the run.
He was a charismatic general of an established and legally recognised institution of a formal state. Solemaini was the military commander of Iran’s elite Quds force or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the equivalent of the US Special Forces or the Marine.
He had discretely arrived in the neighbouring Iraq, where Tehran has been playing a vital role to stabilise the country after it was devastated by the US, and was in a small convoy of cars from the airport when the deadly drone attack was orchestrated, killing both him and his Iraqi host, along with a few others. Trump and his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, gloated over the state-sponsored murder of a senior military official of another state. This is certainly crossing the lines. Assassinating foreign leaders through the complicity of intelligence agencies with local proxies is normal routine in the deadly game nations sometimes play, as in the overthrow of Chilean leader, Allende Salvador, in 1973, or the 2011 assassination of the Libyan leader, but there was not yet a case until then when a head of state ordered the killing of a key actor of another state in peace time, despite ideological or political disagreement. Trump’s Washington has set a dangerous precedent that must not be allowed to stand, otherwise, key state actors of other countries, be they military commanders, diplomats, ministers, heads of state, think tanks and banks, even scientists, could be framed for unproved terrorist acts and simply murdered by the accusing state. The murder of Solemani was cowardly and showed that Washington has long but unsuccessfully laboured to find local proxies and accomplices within the Iranian rank and, in desperation, chose the most cowardly way to murder a distinguished military commander.
Washington should have declared war against Iran and then gone ahead with some military dexterity to take out Solemani in battle, with his troops either decapitated or put in disarray. To take out a military leader on a routine state visit without troops or arms is an action that is beneath the famed prowess of the US military.
In remarks that should worry Americans about the intelligence quotient of those they have put in high offices, President Trump had then claimed that he ordered the killing of General Solemaini to prevent war and not to start one.
Despite the small circle of his Republican Party co-travellers, the vast majority of Americans, including key political figures, have expressed outrage and queried the wisdom in the murdering of a man who would do more harm to America while dead than he would have done when and if alive.
Even a more serious and sober US administration has poor record of post-conflict peace-building and reconciliation, which has left the country bogged down in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. A chaotic Trump regime characterized by internal purges and dissensions could hardly be expected to pick up the pieces from the fallout of Washington’s most heinous decision in a normally restive region.
Anyone who imagined that the killing of Solemaini would have no consequences only had to take a look at the stock markets worldwide and how panic is driving them downwards even as oil prices take a leap upwards. And these are mere jitters to anticipate Iran’s furry.
Solemaini is a towering military figure in the Middle Eastern region. At the peak of the power of the Islamic State (ISIS), when Washington and the Gulf states in the region were treating the deadly extremist jihadists with kid gloves, Solemaini orchestrated hard and harsh military reprisals that put the delusional zealots in disarray and restored the modicum of territorial integrity to Iraq and Syria, two key states targeted by ISIS as the fountain head of their dream worldwide caliphate.
•Kamrani is cultural consular, Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Nigeria