----- 4 stars ----- Qassem Suleimani and How Nationals Decide to Kill / New Yorker Superb reporting: When nation-states engage in the bloody calculus of killing, the boundary between whom they can target and whom they can’t is porous. On January 3rd, the United States launched a drone strike that executed Major General Qassem Suleimani, the chief of Iran’s élite special-forces-and-intelligence unit, the Quds Force. He was one of Iran’s most powerful leaders, with control over paramilitary operations across the Middle East, including a campaign of roadside bombings and other attacks by proxy forces that had killed at least six hundred Americans during the Iraq War. Since the Hague Convention of 1907, killing a foreign government official outside wartime has generally been barred by the Law of Armed Conflict. When the Trump Administration first announced the killing of Suleimani, officials declared that he had posed an “imminent” threat to Americans. Then, under questioning and criticism, the Administration changed its explanation, citing Suleimani’s role in an ongoing “series of attacks.” Eventually, President Trump abandoned the attempt at justification, tweeting that it didn’t “really matter,” because of Suleimani’s “horrible past.” The President’s dismissal of the question of legality betrayed a grim truth: a state’s decision to kill hinges less on definitive matters of law than on a set of highly malleable political, moral, and visceral considerations. In the case of Suleimani, Trump’s order was the culmination of a grand strategic gamble to change the Middle East, and the opening of a potentially harrowing new front in the use of assassination. The path to Suleimani’s killing began, in effect, with another lethal operation, more than a decade ago—on a winter night in February, 2008, in an upscale residential district of Damascus, Syria. [...] The U.S. describes such lethal operations as “targeted killings”—a term that does not have a long history in international law—to distinguish them from assassinations, which are explicitly prohibited by Reagan’s executive order and the Hague Convention. (In Israel, the terms are used interchangeably.) In practice, the drone wars have rendered the two largely synonymous, by establishing a “very attenuated concept of imminence,” according to Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch. [...] He went on, “The metaphor of war has inured people to killings that, frankly, are quite extraordinary and should be happening only in the narrowest of circumstances. They’ve become almost an ordinary U.S. response.” By the end of Obama’s second term, after fifteen years of drone attacks, Americans no longer paid much attention to them. In polls, a large majority of Americans say they support targeted killings; in most other countries, the majority is firmly against them. [...] “When I heard about Suleimani, my first reaction was ‘Good. I’m not shedding a tear.’ But then my second reaction was ‘Wait—was this thought through at all?’ ” He continued, “In addition to reprisals against our people and our partners in the region, there’s now risk of being forced out of Iraq, which means we’d also need to leave Syria—precisely what Trump wants. It’s also what Suleimani wanted. So if, by Suleimani’s death, we are forced out of Iraq, that to him is a perfect death. That would be the final irony.” Mike Morell, the former deputy director of the C.I.A., said, “We haven’t dealt with the strategic problem that exists. If anything, this will strengthen the opposition to the United States. This guarantees that there’s no negotiated way out of this mess with them.” Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, said that he believed the killing of Suleimani was illegal: “Just because a single lawyer, or even a group of lawyers, says that something is lawful, that does not make it lawful. It just means you got someone to say that.”
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----- 4 stars ----- Qassem Suleimani and How Nationals Decide to Kill / New Yorker Superb reporting: When nation-states engage in the bloody calculus of killing, the boundary between whom they can target and whom they can’t is porous. On January 3rd, the United States launched a drone strike that executed Major General Qassem Suleimani, the chief of Iran’s élite special-forces-and-intelligence unit, the Quds Force. He was one of Iran’s most powerful leaders, with control over paramilitary operations across the Middle East, including a campaign of roadside bombings and other attacks by proxy forces that had killed at least six hundred Americans during the Iraq War. Since the Hague Convention of 1907, killing a foreign government official outside wartime has generally been barred by the Law of Armed Conflict. When the Trump Administration first announced the killing of Suleimani, officials declared that he had posed an “imminent” threat to Americans. Then, under questioning and criticism, the Administration changed its explanation, citing Suleimani’s role in an ongoing “series of attacks.” Eventually, President Trump abandoned the attempt at justification, tweeting that it didn’t “really matter,” because of Suleimani’s “horrible past.” The President’s dismissal of the question of legality betrayed a grim truth: a state’s decision to kill hinges less on definitive matters of law than on a set of highly malleable political, moral, and visceral considerations. In the case of Suleimani, Trump’s order was the culmination of a grand strategic gamble to change the Middle East, and the opening of a potentially harrowing new front in the use of assassination. The path to Suleimani’s killing began, in effect, with another lethal operation, more than a decade ago—on a winter night in February, 2008, in an upscale residential district of Damascus, Syria. [...] The U.S. describes such lethal operations as “targeted killings”—a term that does not have a long history in international law—to distinguish them from assassinations, which are explicitly prohibited by Reagan’s executive order and the Hague Convention. (In Israel, the terms are used interchangeably.) In practice, the drone wars have rendered the two largely synonymous, by establishing a “very attenuated concept of imminence,” according to Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch. [...] He went on, “The metaphor of war has inured people to killings that, frankly, are quite extraordinary and should be happening only in the narrowest of circumstances. They’ve become almost an ordinary U.S. response.” By the end of Obama’s second term, after fifteen years of drone attacks, Americans no longer paid much attention to them. In polls, a large majority of Americans say they support targeted killings; in most other countries, the majority is firmly against them. [...] “When I heard about Suleimani, my first reaction was ‘Good. I’m not shedding a tear.’ But then my second reaction was ‘Wait—was this thought through at all?’ ” He continued, “In addition to reprisals against our people and our partners in the region, there’s now risk of being forced out of Iraq, which means we’d also need to leave Syria—precisely what Trump wants. It’s also what Suleimani wanted. So if, by Suleimani’s death, we are forced out of Iraq, that to him is a perfect death. That would be the final irony.” Mike Morell, the former deputy director of the C.I.A., said, “We haven’t dealt with the strategic problem that exists. If anything, this will strengthen the opposition to the United States. This guarantees that there’s no negotiated way out of this mess with them.” Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, said that he believed the killing of Suleimani was illegal: “Just because a single lawyer, or even a group of lawyers, says that something is lawful, that does not make it lawful. It just means you got someone to say that.”