At What Cost?

Let's get this on the table right from the start. Qasem Soleimani was a bad guy, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is a bad guy, and Iran does bad stuff both in and out of their country. Let's also acknowledge that Iran is a sovereign state and Qasem Soleimani was a military and government official of that sovereign state. That is the problem.

Whether you want to admit it, there are rules in this world both in war and diplomacy. That is the only way modern civilization can survive without constant warfare.

One of those rules is that one country does not kill government officials of another country unless they are at war. Not some difference of philosophy, ideals, commerce, even armed clashes, but declared war. We are not officially at war with Iran. Therefore, we don't get to kill (assassinate) their leaders. They also don't get to assassinate our leaders. These international rules, laws, and conventions often seem ridiculous and can be hard to live with. Regardless, they are still the rules we have agreed to either through United Nations resolutions, the Geneva Convention, or various treaties and agreements. Just like in our personal lives, these rules may be hard to obey.

We don't abide by these international conventions for completely altruistic reasons. We want our diplomats, officials, and military to be able to move about foreign countries with some reasonable assurance that the local government won't detain, harm, or kill them. We aren't happy that there are foreign spies in our country under cover of being diplomats but we don't assassinate them because we have our own spies in other countries pretending to be diplomats. A whole bunch of bad actors come to the US for UN meetings. We don't gun them down in the streets of NYC. In fact, we don't even give them parking tickets.

To make the Soleimani killing even more problematic, our military hit him in Iraq, another sovereign country. I assume Soleimani was in Iraq legally, maybe even an invited guest. Our diplomats and military did not bother to inform the Iraqi government of our plans. Think about that for a moment. How would the US react if members of the Israeli military assassinated a Palestinian official while visiting our country?

We are invited guests of Iraq. There to fight ISIS, not kill foreign officials. Our troops may be evicted over this incident.

Breaking the rules of civilization emboldens others to do the same. That ultimately makes the world a more dangerous place.

On its face, the killing of Soleimani looks like a kneejerk reaction by an impetuous president with no thought of the consequences. It also seems that there was no strategic plan, just reactions. Par for the course.

Iran has already responded. There has been damage to US assets, there will probably be more. Thankfully there were no additional US casualties in Iran's initial response. Sure, we can win any conventional war with Iran. The question is can we prevail over the long haul? Iran is a huge country with over 80 million citizens. They also have a lot of weapons. We have been unable to extricate ourselves from Afghanistan for almost 20 years. A smaller, less populated, less developed, less well-armed country. Think about that.

At this point, no one knows how this will play out.

Let's hope cooler heads prevail and this turns out to be just a short blip on the world scene radar. I am not confident that will happen.

At what cost?

wjh