“The
sonuvabitch got what he deserved.”
I
sipped my drink and grunted, neither agreeing or disagreeing.
We
were sitting in the bar at a local restaurant, watching the TV news. The place is a little out of the way, and even
in the midst of ski season it was devoid of customers except for me and the other
guy as we waited for the kitchen to open.
The
segment we were watching dealt with the targeted killing of Iranian general Qasem
Soleimani in Baghdad. Soleimani, as you undoubtedly know by now, was
the commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force.
In recent years, he has been a key player in Iran’s support of Syrian
strongman Bashir al-Assad and a leader of Shiite militias in the war against
Islamic State in Iraq.
President
Trump’s justification for ordering the killing was that Soleimani posed a
threat to American lives. The unrest in
Baghdad in past weeks, which included an attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad
on New Year’s Eve, is simply the latest symptom of the power vacuum created by
the 2003 invasion and should have been little surprise to anyone. Similarly, Iran has actively meddled in
regional politics as far back as its support of Hezbollah in the 1980s Lebanese
Civil War.
In
short, business as usual. Iraq, Syria, and
Lebanon exist at the intersection of a number of religious and ethnic groups
making national unity impossible absent a one-party state with a strongman at
its apex. And yet the United States and
other Western powers assume they can maintain order and security while
fostering Western-style democracy. In
Iraq’s case, the U.S. withdrawal in 2011 practically ensured its Shiite-majority government would become a client of Iran.
Soleimani
and the Iranian leadership doubtlessly welcomed the deepening of anti-American
sentiment among Iraqis. Iran has engaged
in state-sponsored terrorism in the past and Soleimani’s high-profile presence
in Iraq was not encouraging, his role in defeating ISIS notwithstanding. However, I’m inclined to take Mr. Trump’s
assertion with a grain of salt.
This
isn’t the first time a U.S. president facing an impeachment trial has leveraged
a foreign policy crisis. Bill Clinton
was one lucky so-and-so as 1998 drew to a close. Saddam Hussein had threatened to expel U.N.
weapons inspectors, triggering U.S.-led airstrikes. The Kosovo War for independence was well
under way. And, over the summer,
al-Qaeda made its international debut by detonating car bombs outside our
embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam.
You
don’t want to change commanders in chief in the midst of a perceived national
security crisis. This is arguably one of
the reasons the Senate merely censured Clinton.
(I think, too, that the Republicans would have preferred not to have
gone into the 2000 election facing an incumbent President Gore. But that’s just one of my crank theories.) It didn’t hurt that Clinton’s approval
numbers actually went up before the trial.
I haven’t seen this week’s polls, but the White House is surely counting
on the rally effect to further cement Trump’s apparent acquittal whenever the
Senate decides to hold the trial.
The
timing of Clinton’s sudden emergence as a quasi-war leader didn’t go unnoticed
by a skeptical media. The resemblance to
the recently released Dustin Hoffman movie Wag the Dog was uncanny and
was frequently invoked as the impeachment trial drew nigh.
For
those of you who have never seen a movie made before the turn of the century,
the plot goes like this: An unpopular president facing defeat at the polls cooks
up a hoax war with Albania on the advice of his spin doctors. Hilarity ensues.
Wag
the Dog was
just okay as a comedy, but the film’s conceit wasn’t lost on the chattering
classes. Even journalists sympathetic to
Clinton invoked its title when discussing how foreign policy had suddenly
become so important to an administration more concerned with domestic issues.
The
killing of General Soleimani was handled in the maladroit, hamfisted fashion
typical of the Trump administration’s foreign policy. It’s so all over the map it doesn’t know
which direction it’s going if it ever did.
But I think that makes scant difference to the base. Something went bang, and a brown-skinned
Muslim was dead.
Which
was probably what my bar companion meant with his remark. I guess I could have provoked an argument by
pointing out the nuances of Middle Eastern politics, or that if Soleimani had
committed war crimes he should have been afforded due process and put on trial. But why spoil the prospect of a good meal? I sipped again at my drink and perused the menu. The news moved on to another story. Out of sight, out of mind…for now.
©
2020 The Unassuming Scholar
