US Foreign Policy By Assassination

US Foreign Policy By Assassination

By Graham E. Fuller
Information Clearing House
January 10, 2020

The United States, through its assassination of top-ranking Iranian
General Qasim Soleimani, has once again opened Pandora’s box in
its conduct of foreign policy.

How long does Washington think it can enjoy unique monopoly over
exercise of these forms of international violence before they are
turned against us?

For a brief period we had a monopoly on the use of military use of
drones—now everybody is doing it and the US can now fall victim as
readily as it uses them against others.

Ditto for cyberattacks, pioneered by the US, but now a weapon
at the disposal of any number of middle sized countries.

Assassination is not, of course, a new tactic in the annals
of wartime.

In what technically we must call “peace-time”—despite the many
wars the US has going at the moment—assassination is a dangerous
tool, especially when used in the conduct of foreign policy against
top-ranking foreign officials.

General Soleimani was not just the commander of al-Quds
military forces.

Far more accurately he should be considered the number two figure
of importance in the entire Iranian ruling structure, and perhaps
the most popular political/military figure in Iran.

Or he could be likened to a National Security Adviser in the US,
or to a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, or any number of US regional
commanders put together.

Mark you, this was a blatantly political assassination, and, in the
calculations of most practitioners of international law it was an
act of war.

One can only imagine the US response to a similar Iranian
assassination of a top US regional commander.

That General Soleimani was a formidable opponent of
the US is beyond question.

His strategy, tactics and policies ran circles around the leaden and
ill-conceived policies and leaders of the US war in Iraq—still ongoing
17 years later and that has already cost the US dearly in its feckless
goal to dominate and master Iraq.

The US has long since lost the geopolitical lead in the
Middle East as a whole—going back decades.

The trembling puffery and outrage on the part of most politicians
and commentators in the US that “Soleimani was responsible for
the deaths of any number of American soldiers in Iraq” reflects
either childish naivete or massive self-delusion about what the
nature of war is all about.

Iran knew it was in the US neocon cross-hairs when the US invaded
Iraq in 2003; the standing joke in the US then was that war with
Iraq is fine, but “real men go to war with Iran.”

The US had fully supported Saddam Hussein’s vicious war against
Iran throughout the 1980s.

It was not surprising then that Iran aided the massive uprising of
Iraqi Sunni and Shi’a forces to resist the US military invasion and
occupation of Iraq—a presence that lacked any legal standing.

Naturally Iran provided advice and weapons to Iraqi guerrillas to
facilitate killing the soldiers of the American occupation, that’s
what war is.

The US has supported any number of guerrilla forces around the
world to fight against enemies and regimes we don’t like, starting
with military aid, training, intelligence, joint missions, etc., as
we have seen most recently in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

There is precious little ground for US moral outrage in all of
this—unless one simply assumes, as the US usually does—that
America by definition represents the “moral cause,” the
“good guys,” and has a god-given right to intervene anywhere
and everywhere in the name of freedom, democracy or human
rights or to protect whatever it is.

When it comes to lives lost, the US of course has itself been
responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq as well
as generation of massive internal and external refugee flows.

Yet we convince ourselves that killing others in the name of the
US cause is OK, but anyone resisting, or actually killing Americans
represents an outrage.

Let’s at least have a little sophistication here about the nature
of war and conflict and drop the double standards.

It’s chastening to recall that even during the Cold War the US and
the Soviet Union, by at least tacit agreement, avoided assassination
of significant enemy leaders—although the US did try repeatedly to
assassinate Fidel Castro, among other leaders of smaller hostile
states.

So does Washington really want to open the floodgates to a new
policy—to the assassination of top-ranking officials in countries
we dislike?

Next thing we know, everybody can play.

For that matter, Israel already leads the world in conducting
political assassinations according to an Israeli scholar.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20180730-israels-mossad-
leads-assassinations-in-the-world

The assassination of General Soleimani also revealed Washington’s
continuing assumption of a right to violate the sovereignty of any
country in the world if it deems it in its interest to do so.

And this time Iraq will surely expel all US troops from Iraq
in response to this violation.

Not that withdrawal of US troops from this war, ill-conceived from
the start, is necessarily a bad thing from the perspective of many,
but it surely represents an ignominious end to a failing, pointless,
and brutal invasion that Washington had actually believed would
swing Iraq over into the “pro-US column” as an ally of the US in
the Middle East.

Such naivete further reflects another American deeply cherished
assumption that countries with semi-democratic political systems
will automatically be pro-American.

Has nobody ever heard of national interests?

Or do we believe that US interests globally are now basically
coterminous with the global interests of all peoples (deep down)?

A still bigger issue is at stake here.

The US is has increasingly come to be regarded with dismay by
any number of friends and “allies” for its demand of support for
its dangerous and ill-conceived international policies, threats
and wars.

To sign on to the US global security vision is to have to sign
on to policies many countries are very uncomfortable with.

They are not ready to support US routinely hostile policies towards
Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, and many others. Nor are they ready to
lend the automatic support to Israel that Washington demands.

This growing reluctance of one-time friends and allies has grown
under Trump, but goes back at the very least to George W. Bush
and the Global War on Terror—“you’re either with us or against us.”

No one in Europe and few in the world supported Washington’s
tearing up of the nuclear treaty with Iran, nor do they support
the crushing sanctions the US has imposed upon Iran since then
for which it demands compliance.

Increasingly Europe and other “allies” no longer find it comfortable
to be allied with a US whose foreign policies are obsessively
focussed on identification of enemies and where we expect our
allies to fall into line—starting before the US invasion of Iraq.

This latest act of “foreign policy by assassination” will be
largely rejected by most in the world.

Only a few craven Gulf kings and princes—and Israel—will
applaud it.

And worst of all, the US has now taken one more giant step
towards convincing the world that the US has indeed become
a “Rogue Nation” no longer willing to follow the rules of
international law and procedure—and wisdom—that it claims
to lead.

Fewer and fewer countries anywhere are going to sign up for war or
searches for “alliances” that can be turned against Russia or China.

Indeed, as the era of US global dominance is drawing to an end
it looks like the US is taking the process very, very hard indeed.

It may soon deprive itself of most influence and respect if policies
like the assassinations of top leaders of countries we don’t like
become the new US norm.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52821.htm