Killing soleimani — it's not about trump | thearticle

Here in the United States, the drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani is being primarily covered by the major news institutions as a story about Donald Trump. That is indeed one important

angle — he’s the man who ordered the strike, and as president, he will manage the coming consequences for the United States. But this event is a lot more than a story about Trump. The

criticism that American policymakers and society have become self-absorbed and consumed by partisan politics feels more than fair. In theory, this strike should have scrambled the usual

partisan divide. A portion of Trump’s voters supported him because of his pledge to bring the troops home from “endless wars”. He also promised to put “America first,” and sneered at the

Bush administration’s military actions. Democrats certainly didn’t see themselves as friends of Soleimani and prefer targeted strikes to invasions and occupations. And yet, the reaction has

been depressingly, predictably partisan. Fans of the president love it, seeing Trump as bold and heroic, punching a bully right in the face; critics of the president hate it, labelling it a

wildly risky ploy that was probably done to distract the country from impeachment. (That effort is likely to fall short of the 67 votes in the Senate needed to remove the president.) As

usual, it’s easy to picture a president of a different party doing the same thing and the reactions being reversed. Democrats certainly registered few vocal objections to President Obama’s 

563 airstrikes, largely by drones, hitting targets in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, during his two terms. On paper, targeting a top Iranian military commander and spymaster on Iraqi soil with

a drone is less risky than sending 79 commandos and a canine deep into Pakistan to raid a compound that was a third of a mile from a military academy of the Pakistani Army. But to a lot of

Trump’s critics — both among Democrats and the right-leaning dissidents who left the GOP — bombing Soleimani is more or less just another crazy or outrageous thing that Trump did, right up

there with cutting taxes on the rich, or withdrawing from the Paris climate change accords, or trying to get the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens, or any of the nutty things he

says at a rally. American politics is stuck in a depressingly rote cycle, where the president does something, his allies insist it is the greatest action by any US president ever, his

critics insist it is the most outrageous crime by any American leader ever, and then after a day or two of arguing, the country moves on to the next controversy du jour. What the president

actually does almost doesn’t seem to matter. Trump has managed to get partisans to completely reverse what they previously believed was correct; after Trump decided to allocate $12 billion

in new federal assistance to farmers adversely impacted by the trade wars, 78 per cent of Republicans supported this new federal entitlement, and 66 per cent of Democrats opposed it. Every

decision by Trump becomes a referendum on the president himself, instead of what the decision actually is. Back in 2013, the conservative blogger who writes under the pen name “Ace of

Spades” diagnosed a phenomenon he called, “the MacGuffinization of American politics.” In a movie or book, “the MacGuffin” is the object that drives the plot, and Alfred Hitchcock noted that

what the MacGuffin actually is rarely matters, so long as the audience understands that the protagonist and antagonist both want it. Ace observed that in 2013, a lot of political coverage

treated President Obama as the hero, his GOP opponents as the villains, and whatever issue was being debated was the not-that-important MacGuffin that they were both pursuing. That same

year, Edward Snowden revealed to the world just how extensive and far-reaching the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance activities were, including leaking classified materials that

both Democrats and Republicans agreed “handed over secrets that protect American troops overseas and secrets that provide vital defenses against terrorists and nation states.” The most

common framing of the discussion around Snowden was “Edward Snowden: Hero or Traitor?” The American media discussion instantly focused around a person rather than an issue, and the

perception of the figure was shoehorned into a binary choice — either very good or very bad. But if you looked hard at what Snowden revealed, you could easily come to the conclusion, “It’s

complicated.” You could be deeply upset about what the NSA was doing but find Snowden’s methods and his decision to run to Hong Kong and then Russia, unacceptable. You could want better

safeguards against abuse of these powerful and secret programmes, and still find Snowden to be irresponsible, naïve, arrogant, self-righteous, and/or a willing or unwitting pawn of hostile

foreign regimes. In the Trump era, every issue gets personalised and shoehorned into a binary choice. But bombing Soleimani is not “just another crazy or outrageous thing that Trump did”.

It’s complicated. Soleimani was a butcher who had the blood of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of innocent people on his hands. He was responsible for explosive devices in Iraq, Iranian

military adventurism in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and the brutal crackdown of his fellow Iranians in the Green Revolution in 2009 and the provincial demonstrations in 2017. The world is a

better place without him. But his killing probably also makes the world less safe, at least in the short run. Iran is going to retaliate against Americans in one way or another, and not just

by defacing obscure federal government library websites. Someone, somewhere, is going to get killed and it could happen in the Middle East or perhaps even far from Iran, in Europe or the

United States or south-east Asia. For at least the short term, the Iranian regime is going to be more bellicose — dropping any pretence of honouring the nuclear deal, maximising pressure on

the Iraqi government to force out the Americans. American military operations against ISIS will be slowed and hindered because of the need to be alert for Iranian-backed militia attacks. The

price for taking out Soleimani is going to be steep. The question of whether killing Soleimani was worth it will be a big one in US foreign policy in the year to come. Unfortunately, in

much of the American media, that question will take a backseat to the question that is more exciting, fun, and generates higher ratings: whether or not this helps Trump’s bid for

re-election.