Remember that Iranian general the United States assassinated back in January? The one whose killing the Trump administration justified as necessary to stop imminent attacks on American targets?
Just kidding on that imminence thing.
In the legally required notice outlining the legal and policy rationale behind the killing of Qassem Soleimani delivered to Congress today, the Trump administration dropped all assertions that the leader of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force was assassinated to prevent an imminent attack.
While the notice argues that under Article II of the Constitution the president has the power as commander-in-chief to authorize military in the face of an imminent threat of attack against the United States, the notice carefully avoids making any such claim of imminence in its statement of the facts surrounding the Jan. 2 operation:
The President directed this action in response to an escalating series of attacks in preceding months by Iran and Iran-backed militias on United States forces and interests in the Middle East region. The purposes of this action were to protect United States personnel, to deter Iran from conducting or supporting further attacks against United States forces and interests, to degrade Iran’s and Qods Force-backed militias’ ability to conduct attacks and to end Iran’s strategic escalation of attacks on, and threats to United States interests.
No mention of an impending attack there. Nor in this later passage:
Iran’s past and recent activities, coupled with intelligence at the time of the air strike, indicated that Iran’s Qods Force posed a threat to the United States in Iraq, and the air strike against Soleimani was intended to protect United States personnel and deter future Iranian attack plans against United States forces and interests in Iraq and threats emanating from Iraq.
So, to summarize, why did the United States kill Qassem Soleimani on Jan. 2, bringing us to the brink of war with Iran?
- In response to prior attacks
- In response to an escalating series of attacks
- To deter Iran from making future attacks
- To deter future Iranian attack plans
- To degrade the capabilities of Iran and its Iraqi militia proxies
None of this amounts to the kind of immediate threat that the Trump administration claimed required it to assassinate the highest-ranking military leader of a rival government. Instead, it sounds like a deliberate, premeditated, act of war. Looks like I was right when I wrote this a month ago:
Of course it could also be that there was no looming threat, imminent or otherwise. Perhaps the assassination of Soleimani was part of a larger, planned operation, to remove the leadership of Iran’s Quds Force, essentially the special operations wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has served as the primary means by which Iran has cultivated militia and terrorist clients and waged proxy war across the region to advance its foreign policy and security goals.
Just Security has posted a lengthy and detailed analysis of the Trump administration’s notice to Congress. You can read it here.
That the Trump administration lied about its justification for killing Soleimani is probably the least surprising fact in the whole sordid affair. The most surprising is that they complied with the law and reported to Congress at all.
