War Crimes
The decision by Donald Trump as President of the United States to order the murder Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani of Iran was an act of war. It is a war crime and a crime against humanity. It is murder made possible by the illegal use of state power. The President, Vice President Mike Pence, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who encouraged this action, are equally guilty.
So are the generals and advisors who treat military violence as little more than options on a menu.
They reflect the lack of moral judgment in this administration. Such actions come in a long line of such abuses of power, misuses of force, and refusal to look at the consequences of actions.
What is sure to be an escalating conflict with Iran goes back nearly 100 years. As the world moved toward confrontations with Nazi Germany Reza Shah Pahlavi was drifting closer to Hitler. Fearing the loss of control, Great Britain with the help of its then ally the Soviet Union, occupied Iran, forced the reigning Shah into exile and put European educated Mohamad Reza, his eldest son, in power. After the war, as popular movements for more democracy gained momentum across the globe, the power of the corrupt, autocratic Shah was challenged by Mohammad Mosaddegh. A popularly elected leader, as Prime Minister from 1951 to 1953 he moved to nationalize British petroleum interests and pushed for more accountable government. The CIA and Britain’s M16 staged a coup, imprisoning him for 3 years in solitary confinement and then placing him under house arrest until his death in 1967. They restored the Shah to power. This illegal and misguided action by the CIA led directly to the growth of anti-US feeling and fueled the 1979 Revolution.
This murder also reflects how much the Bush drive to war changed our understanding of world relationships and responsibilities. In response to 9/11, George W. Bush articulated something called the Doctrine of Preemption. Bush argued that the use of force was justified if we anticipated an attack. He expanded earlier ideas to claim that force could be used, even without evidence of an imminent attack in order to ensure that a serious threat to the US does not “gather” or grow over time. This broadly based doctrine was seriously flawed. Within two years of its invocation to justify the Iraq war, it was considered deeply flawed.
The two assumptions behind this doctrine proved in practice to be wrong. The first assumption was that the US would have reliable intelligence about the intentions and capabilities of adversaries. This proved completely false as US officials hunted frantically for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Second was the belief that we hand entered a new era of technology that would give us the edge in any combat situation. As the Brookings Institute noted its assessment of the doctrine in 2004:
“This belief, which seemed so convincing in the immediate afterglow of the U.S. military’s rapid march to Baghdad, looks naive in the wake of the fighting in Fallouja and Najaf. Not only have the costs of war escalated significantly in the 13 months since the president prematurely declared an end to major combat operations, but the emphasis on breaking regimes ignored the far more difficult task of rebuilding nations.”
We need to take a forceful, consistent stand against this drive to war. Trump’s decision to kill, to announce this action to cheering crowds, to threaten even greater violence via twitter, is criminal. He deserves far more than impeachment. He and his enablers should be tried by the world court for crimes against humanity. And we must look deeply at ourselves as a people.
As Dr. King so clearly reminded us,
“It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries.… Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores.”
For now, all of us must know that the chickens do indeed come home to roost.