The United States recently assassinated Iran’s Qassem Soleimani which raises, once again, moral questions about targeted killings of this sort. While it is easy to get bogged down in the particulars of this assassination, I will focus on the general matter of the ethics of assassination.
While the definition of “assassination” can be debated and the term has a negative connotation, the general idea is that it is a targeted killing aimed to achieve a political, economic or ideological end. While one could quibble over the fine points of various definitions, I will not do that here. My main concern is with the issue of whether assassination can be morally warranted.
It can be argued that I am misguided to even consider this issue. Some might point out that an assassination is killing and killing is wrong—thus there is no need to discuss the specifics of assassination. This would be true if all killing was wrong; which would nicely settle all debates involving this matter. For what follows I will assume, perhaps incorrectly, that at least some killings are morally acceptable.
Others might raise a different worry, namely that ethics does not enter the matter. Someone could take the purely pragmatic approach that a country should kill when doing so is advantageous—that, as Hobbes would say, profit is the measure of right. This is certainly a viable approach but has the clear implication that if the United States is justified in killing Soleimani on pragmatic grounds, then everyone else is equally justified in engaging in assassination when doing so is to their advantage.
One can certainly reject ethics as part of the decision-making process of killing and accept the pragmatic justification of “kill when doing so is to your advantage.” But this principle would also justify anyone killing you who regarded it as advantageous—such as wanting your property or who saw you as an obstacle or threat. This would seem to be a problematic principle.
In some cases, people seem to get confused about what counts as ethics. For example, on a recent Facebook discussion someone rejected the notion of applying ethics to the assassination and appealed to self defense (we were justified in killing him because he was going to harm us) and retribution (he had a role in killing Americans and others). But the self-defense and retribution justifications are moral justifications.
An “anger justification” was also advanced, which is a common tactic used to try to justify violence. The gist of the argument made against me was that I would be mad if someone I knew had been killed by Soleimani, mad enough to kill him. So, killing him was justified. The gist of the “logic” seems to be
Premise 1: If B did X to you, then you would be angry enough to do Y to B.
Conclusion: Doing Y to B is morally justified.
While there seems to be a certain macho appeal to this “reasoning”, whether I would be angry enough to kill someone is irrelevant to whether killing them is morally right. While this might be emotionally effective in cases where the target is angry about the specific matter, the failure in the logic becomes evident when one considers general cases in which anger is used to justify violence. For example, imagine a husband who killed his wife because she wanted to divorce him for his infidelity, and he was enraged at her. Even if you were a terrible sort of person who would also be angry enough to kill their spouse in this situation, it would hardly make it right. It is a common error to think that because one is angry that one is justified in the anger and hence right; but this does not follow. The anger one feels is irrelevant to truth and justification. Naturally, a person can be both justified and angry, so anger does not invalidate justification—but the question to ask is whether the anger is warranted or not. If a principle was adopted that anger justified killing, it would mean that Soleimana would also be justified in his killings (if he was angry) and that someone who was angry at you would be justified if they killed you. This all seems absurd, so the principle of anger is also absurd. So, what is needed is a moral justification.
A good historical example to consider is Operation Vengeance. In WWII, American P-38 fighters were deployed to intercept and kill Japanese Admiral Yamamoto. They succeeded in downing Yamamoto’s “Betty” bomber and his body was subsequently found by the Japanese. This, as might be imagined, had a significant impact on the war in terms of morale and the elimination of one of the top Japanese leaders.
The moral justification for this is clear: when one is engaged in war, then specific leadership targets are legitimate targets. In the broader moral perspective, the overall ethics of a killing would depend on whether the war was just or unjust. In fact, one could argue that targeting leaders in a just war is often morally superior to the killing of anonymous combatants. In general, the soldiers fighting in a war are not involved in the decisions that started the war and would often not be engaged in violence without being sent by their leaders. In contrast, the leaders are making the decisions and hence bear more moral responsibility. As such, if a soldier in a war is a morally legitimate target for violence, then the leaders who sent them to war are also morally legitimate targets.
In the case of Soleimani, the United States and Iran are not at war—hence the ethics of war do not apply. However, one could appeal to the ethics of conflict between nations. In general, killing the citizens of other nations outside of war is generally wrong—but there can be exceptions if the person killed did things that were wrong enough to warrant their being killed. In the case of Soleimani, if he did enough evil to morally warrant his death, then his assassination would be morally warranted. But accepting this as a justification requires accepting the corresponding moral principle and we would need to accept that Americans could also be justly killed by other nations if their evil deeds warranted their deaths. For example, there are certainly those who would argue that the deaths caused by Obama and Bush could morally warrant their assassination on moral grounds.
Aww. He looks so friendly and innocent. He has been “angelized.”
I’m frankly not surprised that military leaders all agree that assassinating military leaders is wrong and immoral.
I see it exactly the opposite way. I am all in favor of targeted killing of military leaders.
You are concentrating on the personal position, and ignoring the circumstances.
Soleimani, if we are being informed correctly, was actively orchestrating attacks in Iraq. He came to Baghdad to do that. He was responsible for the attack on the embassy, and was organising other attacks.
These circumstances put him in the same position as if he were driving a truck full of explosives to detonate in a city or base, as an active combatant engaged in an attack.
If you have evidence that this is not the case, you should present it. However, it appears that this was his designated role in Iran’s military, as the mastermind of their proxy war, and not even Iran is denying it.
Your essay makes no distinction between Soleiman actively attacking a foreign country, and Americans in a foreign country, and a regular Iranian general or politician going about his day in Tehran.
There may be a case for assassinating combatants, including and especially those who issue orders for the hostilities, outside of active operations, but Soleimani is an inappropriate case to use as an example of that.
Your essay makes no distinction between Soleiman actively attacking a foreign country, and Americans in a foreign country, and a regular Iranian general or politician going about his day in Tehran.
So you’re saying it’s Groundhog Day again.
It’s always Groundhog Day!
Looking around at what passes for commentary on US web “news”, I do keep seeing “bad dude had it coming” a lot. And, of course, “revered military war hero slain” from the Iranian pres… sorry, that was the New York Times. Not much difference, really, though.
I am bemused that few seem to be noticing that the US didn’t put a missile through IRGC HQ or other government buildings in Tehran. Instead, they attacked actively hostile troops in the field – just high-ranking ones.
There may well be some interesting considerations around assassinating leaders outside combat with the expectation that this will save friendly lives, but that discussion – with or without poisoned cigars – really has nothing to do with this case.
From the standpoint of our enemies, our generals are in the same situation as Soleimani: they are organizing and directing attacks against people in foreign countries and these are contrary to the ends of the country making the judgment. After all, we have leaders in Iraq directing attacks in Iraq; which is what Soleimani was doing.
Now, you can make a moral case that we are the good guys and the Iranians are the bad guys, so their killing people is bad and our killing is good. But we do need to be consistent in our ethics of killing.
I apologise. I misread your last paragraph of the post. You are not endorsing the position that it was legitimate to kill Soleimani relying solely on the basis that he ordered so many deaths; you were pointing out that people advancing that argument must, to be consistent, accept that the same argument would justify killing Bush or Obama. I agree.
I do think that people advancing the Bad Guy argument alone are trapped in their rhetoric, and making an error.
In the case of Soleimani, the United States and Iran are not at war—hence the ethics of war do not apply.
Disagree. We are clearly at war with Iran. True, not a total war, but war nevertheless.
Conflict, but not actually war. Then again, “war” is very vague term.
Apparently so is ‘ethics’.
I’m afraid I don’t see any situation in which the indiscriminate slaughter of troops in the field is morally acceptable but the targeted killing of their leader is wrong. Does anybody disagree?
My first thought is that I’d object to the word “assassinate” in this context. While you don’t want to debate the finer points of the definition, you state that “the general idea is that it is a targeted killing aimed to achieve a political, economic or ideological end”
I agree with that definition, but that’s not what happened here. Soleimani was killed because he was a dangerous terrorist, who represented a clear threat to American lives. There was nothing political, economic, or ideological about it.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force that Soleimani commanded was a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization, which gave its members the same status as al-Qaida, the Islamic State or any other terrorist group. According to the Pentagon, Soleimani was actively planning attacks against American forces, something he had done many times. You can parse words like “war” versus “conflict”, but the fact is that Soleimani was directly responsible for attacks on Americans that cost many hundreds of lives. While Trump’s surgical strike that took him out has been decried as “escalatory”, it is Suleiman himself who had been escalating aggression against American allies in the Middle East.
In September, drone attacks destroyed two major Saudi oil installations, threatening to disrupt the world’s oil market. These attacks were claimed by the Houthi forces of Yemen, but a UN report made it clear that the drones had come from Iran, and Soleimani backed the attack.
In December, an Iraqi airbase in Kirkuk province was attacked by more than 30 rockets, killing an American civilian contractor and injuring four U.S. service members and two Iraqi security forces personnel. The U.S. blamed the Iranian-backed Kata’ib Hezbollah (KH) militia. In his post as commander of the Quds Force, Soleimani oversaw military operations for the three main Shiite militias in Iraq—KH, the Badr Organization, and AAH.
Later that month, the US Embassy came under attack by mobs of Shiite militia, under the direction of and with the approval of Soleiman. The statement issued by the US Department of Defense:
“General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region. General Soleimani and his Quds Force were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and coalition service members and the wounding of thousands more. He had orchestrated attacks on coalition bases in Iraq over the last several months – including the attack on December 27th – culminating in the death and wounding of additional American and Iraqi personnel. General Soleimani also approved the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad that took place this week.
This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans. The United States will continue to take all necessary action to protect our people and our interests wherever they are around the world.”
While you may want to cast Soleimani as a political martyr, the victim of an ideological assassination, and you may want to parse words and say that we were not in a state of war, that is not the way Soleimani was behaving. He was acting as a field general, conducting attacks on US allies, US interests, and US personnel in the region.
Don’t forget – the last time a US Embassy was stormed like this, the result was the death of the US Ambassador. And the last time a US Embassy was attacked by Iranian-backed forces, 52 American civilians were held hostage for 444 days. The United States was well within its rights to take action to protect American lives, and so we did – by cutting the head off the snake.
In fact, Suleimani was never supposed to be in Baghdad in the first place. Why was he there? Having been designated an international terrorist by the United Nations, he has been subject to a UN enforced international travel ban and asset freeze since 2007.
The answer is that US intelligence is correct. The Department of Defense is correct. Suleimani was in Baghdad actively carrying out attacks on the US, on the US Embassy, and on US interests in the area.
To call this an assassination is ridiculous – especially given the definition you provide. The only similarity this strike has to an assassination is that it was targeted and surgical, and resulted in zero collateral damage.
Your little X’s, Y’s and B’s are cute, but they are meaningless. This attack was not because we were mad at him for hurting us and we wanted to hurt him back, as though the Middle East were some kind of playground. The attack was because he was sworn to destroy us, has been following that mission for years and would continue to strike at us, killing Americans and American allies at every chance he got unless he was stopped. There are many players in this war, many factions led by different leaders – but the all acknowledge that the real force that has guided them all was Qassam Soleiman.
U.S. diplomat Ali Khedery confirmed Soleimani’s strong connection with (KH leader) Jamal Jafaar Ibrahimi in particular. According to Khedery, “I heard from Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish officials and virtually all of them told me that the real prime minster of [Iraq] is Qasem Soleimani and his deputy is [Jamal Jaafar Ibrahimi, also known as] Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.”
Ibrahimi, of course, was killed alongside of Soleimani on January 3. Good riddance. The two of them were no different than Himmler and Goering (there – the obligatory Nazi comparison – but a pretty accurate one in terms of the brutal inhumanity carried out by the lot of them).
I think it is absolutely shameful and disgusting the way the Democrats and the Media are taking the side of these brutal terrorists, calling them martyrs, and publicly calling Trump a war criminal – essentially giving aid and comfort to the enemy – for their own nefarious political ends.
I think it is absolutely shameful and disgusting the way the Democrats and the Media are taking the side of these brutal terrorists
Two out of three ain’t bad. But I still think you’re being a bit too polite here. There’s a third institution missing. You know which one, right?
I do. My disgust with the first two, however, is the very public face that they are putting on their outcry. It used to be customary for the US to keep our internal conflicts to ourselves when engaged in some violent conflict overseas – saying to the world, “We have our disagreements, but they are ours. We are still a single sovereign country”.
Not so these days, and therein lies my disgust. The Democrats, especially, with the unflagging support of the media, have presented themselves as being allied with Iran against Trump and the Republicans. This has given the former much standing on the world stage, and much ammunition in the propaganda war.
As for the third institution, well, I expect that sort of thing from academia, but it doesn’t carry the same “This is the Official Position of the US Government” impact on the world.
Also meant to say re:
While Trump’s surgical strike that took him out has been decried as “escalatory”, it is Suleiman himself who had been escalating aggression against American allies in the Middle East.
THIS. But it’s typical of the pattern of such ‘thinkers’. Only interested in the facts that make the point that they want to make. There’s a word for this.
“imagine a husband who killed his wife because she wanted to divorce him for his infidelity, and he was enraged at her. Even if you were a terrible sort of person who would also be angry enough to kill their spouse in this situation, it would hardly make it right. “
Haha! Totally. So in this analogy, the US is the husband and Soleimani is the wife, right? And so Soleiman wanted to what, break off relations with Iran because we are infidels? Or because we pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal? And we got mad at him for that so we killed him? Is that how you see this?
Maybe you should read a little more. Here’s one:
There is a wife (Soleimani) who wants to divorce her husband (the US) for his infidelity. Or maybe because he is messing with her privacy, and she thinks he’s too controlling. Whatever the details, she’s genuinely pissed at him.
So she goes to his friends (allies) and starts hurting them. Not wanting to get caught herself, she gets some others to do her dirty work – these “proxies” set fire to his friends’ houses, blow up their cars, and in some cases actually murder them.
The husband responds by tightening the screws. He denies her access to his checking account, and starts snooping around in her closet to see what she’s up to. He tries to get some support from his friends, but they back away, afraid. “You’re on your own, buddy”.
The husband then goes to the police (Congress). The police also tell him he is the one to blame, that she has every right to do what she’s doing – but even if they believe otherwise, they don’t want to do anything for fear of making her even more angry than she is already.
The wife has her proxies go to the husband’s business associates and clients, and begins her destructive behavior with them, destroying access to materials and resources, and blocking delivery routes; in some cases injuring and/or killing some of them in the process. She threatens to kill his family (members of the embassy).
The wife refuses to talk. The officials and friends who are supposed to be on his side secretly may be, but won’t act publicly for fear of making her angrier. The husband believes the wife’s threats, as she has done nothing in the past to indicate that she won’t follow through. The husband, wanting first and foremost to protect his family and himself, sees no other recourse, no other way to stop her but to kill her.
So he does.
And, true to the way the laws are often carried out in this country, the husband is arrested and put in prison, and must go to court to defend himself against charges of premeditated murder.
And, true to the way these things transpire in this country, the verdict will have little to do with right and wrong, and even less to do with the circumstances of the killing. Rather, it will be politically motivated, and based on a steady stream of propaganda being fed to the public, raising anger among the torch-and-pitchfork crowd, such that the judge and jury are afraid to find an honest verdict.
In looking at the rather prolific history of Qasem Soleimani, it is the considered opinion of many military leaders that his actions compare to those of Osama Bin Laden. He is responsible for the deaths of many hundreds of Americans; he was sanctioned by the US, by the UN, by Switzerland and others as an international terrorist.
The Quds forces, of which he was the leader, has provided weaponry, strategy, training, and support for virtually every one of the enemies of US allies in the middle east; supporting the Assad regime in the Syrian civil war, Hezbullah, and Hamas. They are known to have committed covert assassinations of the political opponents of Iran.
His death occurred after a string of attacks on US bases and/or interests in Iraq, and it has been said by Donald Trump that he was planning to attack the US Embassy in Iraq. It’s no secret that the left in this country will take whatever point of view opposes Trump, and chooses to disbelieve every word that comes out of his mouth – but saner heads realize that Trump has a cadre of military advisers and intelligence from the Department of Defense; he is not the “loose cannon war monger” acting on his own.
A senior U.S. Defense official said that when Trump was presented with options regarding Iranian threats, other proposals besides killing Soleimani would have involved the possibility of far more casualties. As hated as Trump is, a close look at his decisions will reveal that preventing casualties is a primary objective of his.
You have disputed most of these facts, and offered moral and ethical arguments against the killing of Soleimani.
My question is, “What is the difference between the US targeted killing of Soleimani and that of Osama Bin Laden?
Surely there must be more than just the fact that the Bin Laden killing was ordered by Obama, and the Soleimani killing was ordered by Trump – but what are those differences?
Bin Laden was actually in hiding, unarmed, inactive, and living with his family.
Soleimani was active, in a country where he did not belong, and actively carrying out attacks against the US and US interests.
You have said in essays in 2011 that the killing of Bin Laden was a success, whereas in 2020 your essays decry the killing of Soleimani, claiming that it was a politically motivated “assassination”, and have questioned the moral and ethical underpinnings of the act.
In the case of the killing of Soleimani, you offer many examples of when such a killing might be justified, and just as many as to when it may not be; you explore the moral and ethical dimensions with great care.
In the case of the killing of Bin Laden, your justification is much simpler. From your May 6, 2011 essay, you say,
“…I think that my considered opinion is best put by the professor who taught me about military ethics: “some people you just have to kill.””
Please help me to understand. Can you expound on the differences between these situations that have led you to such different conclusions?
Or is it really just simple partisanship, and nothing more?