Was General Soliman's murder justified?

On January 3rd, the United States killed Qasssem Soleiman, a senior Iranian military commander, while he was leaving Baghdad International Airport in a car with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an Iraqi leader of Kataéb Hezbollah militia supported by Iran. Everyone in the car was killed. The next day, at a special press conference, a senior official from the U.S. State Department said that Soleiman had been, for 20 years, the main “architect” of Iran's terrorist attacks and that there were 608 Americans killed in Iraq alone.” He added that Soleiman and Muhandis were named terrorists by the United Nations and that the “s of these two people are really bad”.

In 2003, American intelligence regarding the possession of weapons of mass destruction by Iraq was completely wrong. These mistakes led to the invasion of Iraq, which opened the way for Iran and Soliman's involvement in the country. But let's assume that this time the facts are as the American administration says. Was double murder justified?

We can begin with the assumption that it is wrong to take human life. President Donald Trump will not deny this. A year ago, for example, he said: “I will always defend the first right in our Declaration of Independence, the right to life.” Trump was referring to his comments to campaign activists against abortion, but a life right worth fetuses should also be applied to older people.

However, is there any exception for the bad people”? Again, to keep the argument as straightforward as possible, let us assume that the right to life protects only innocent people. Who Judges innocence? If we support, as Americans often say, “a government of laws, not of men”, there must be a legal process to determine guilt. Since 2002, the International Criminal Court, the ICC, has been trying to implement this process throughout the globe. I The CC has had some apparent successes in prosecuting war crimes perpetrators and crimes against humanity, but the tribunal's goal is limited and its expansion has not been helped by the US's refusal to join the 122 countries that have accepted its jurisdiction.

In the course of Solejman's assassination, Agnès Callamard, special rapporteur for extratrial executions at the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights's Office, noted that there is no oversight of murders committed beyond the borders of a country. The executive simply decides, without any regular legal process or approval from any other branch of government, who will be killed. Accepting such an act makes it difficult to find any principled opposition to similar murders, planned or carried out by other countries. This includes “Café Milan Plot” of 2011, allegedly designed by Soleiman himself, in which Iranian agents planned to kill Saudi Ambassador to the US while he slept in a famous restaurant in Washington.

The only thing the United States can say in defense of the killings committed by them is that they are targeting really bad people and Saudi ambassador was not a bad man. This places human rule over rule of law.

The next argument the Pentagon offered for the murder was referring to “preventing future plans of Iranian attacks”. As Callamard stressed, this is not the same as the immediate “attack required to justify this action in the context of international law defence. She also noted that others were killed in the attack, reportedly seven people died, and suggested that these other deaths were very clearly illegal.

A careful reading of the 3 January press conference transcript, held by three unknown senior State Department officials, reveals the administration's true opinion. In response to repeated questions about the reason for the assassination, an official compared it to the crash of a 1943 plane carrying Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who was visiting Japanese Pacific troops, an incident that occurred in the middle of the war more than a year after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Another official said, "When I hear these questions, I feel like you're describing Belgium over the past 40 years. It's Iranian regime. We have 40 years of war acts that this regime has committed against different countries on five continents.” At one point, the official who had compared the murder to Yamamoto's murder erupted: “O Jesus! Should we really explain why we do these things?

If senior State Department officials believe that the U.S. is engaged in a fair war with Iran, as it was with Japan in 1943, Solejman's murder makes sense. According to the standard theory of fair warfare, you can kill your enemies whenever you can do so, as long as the importance of objective exceeds the so-called collateral damage or hurt the innocent. But the United States is not at war with Iran. The US Constitution gives Congress authority to declare war and he has never declared war on Iran. Chamber Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested that the leaders of Congress should have consulted about the plan to kill Soleiman. If he were an act of war, she's right.

If, on the other hand, the murder was not an act of war, then, as an extratrial murder that was not necessary to prevent an imminent attack, this murder was illegal and not ethical. It risks causing negative consequences, not only in the escalation of a revenge in the Middle East, but also contributing to a further decline in the rule of international law. /Buriment: Project Syndicate/In Albanian by: BIRN/