Killing Qassim Soleimani: rule of law or rule of the jungle?
By James M.
Dorsey
A podcast version of this story is
available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spreaker, Pocket Casts, Tumblr, Podbean, Audecibel, Patreon and Castbox.
International
law may not be a major consideration in debates about the US killing of Iranian
military commander Qassim Soleimani, yet the legality of the assassination
could prove to have long-term consequences for whether the rule of law or the
law of the jungle dominates a new world order.
The Trump
administration has asserted that killing Mr. Soleimani was necessary to avert
an imminent attack on US targets that allegedly was being planned by Mr.
Soleimani and Abdul Mahdi al-Muhandis, the leader of an Iranian-backed Iraqi
militia, who also died in the attack.
The
assertion, yet to be backed up by evidence, served to justify the attack and
fend off allegations that the targeted killing violated both US and
international law.
The
implication was that Mr. Soleimani’s death would thwart an unspecified imminent
attack and stop the Iranians in their tracks, an assumption that has little
foundation in reality given Iran’s track record, most recently its refusal to
buckle under following the imposition in 2018 of harsh US economic sanctions,
some of the harshest ever imposed.
The notion
that the killing of Mr. Soleimani amounted to rule of the jungle rather than
rule of law was reinforced by assertions by Iraqi prime minister Adel Abdul
Mahdi that he had been asked by Mr. Trump to mediate with
Iran and that the Iranian military leader had been carrying Iran’s response to
a Saudi initiative to defuse tension when he was assassinated.
Mr Abdul
Mahdi’s allegation that Mr. Soleimani was involved in efforts to dial down
tensions came in a debate in parliament in which lawmakers called in a resolution for
the removal from Iraq of foreign forces, the bulk of which are American.
Mr. Abdul
Mahdi’s assertion that Iran was responding to a Saudi initiative was all the
more noteworthy given that the kingdom had reportedly recently put its indirect
outreach to Iran on hold as anti-government protesters in Iraq and Lebanon targeted Iranian influence in their
countries.
“Americans,
once the most prominent proponents of international law as the regulator of
relations between nations, have now fully validated the law of the jungle. We are now likely to experience it,"
said Chas W. Freeman Jr, a former career US State Department official in an
email to a private mailing list.
Conservative
commentator Robert Kagan warned in a book published last year, bemoaning
America’s withdrawal as an enforcer of international law, a notion challenged by
an array of critics, that chaos was the world’s historical norm. “The jungle
will grow back, if we let it,” Mr. Kagan argued.
The sense
that Mr. Trump, like many of the world’s civilizational leaders, has no regard
for international law was evident, particularly to Iranians, in his threat to attack Iranian cultural
sites if Iran
retaliates for the killing of Mr. Soleimani.
Mr. Trump
did not specify what he meant by cultural. Some analysts suggested the
president may have been referring to symbols like the mausoleum of
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran’s Islamic republic.
With
millions in the streets to welcome the return of Mr. Soleimani’s body, Iranians
used the hashtag #IranianCulturalSites to respond to the threat by posting
online pictures of mosques, museums, monuments, archaeological sites, and other
Iranian architectural marvels.
Similarly, with
Iraq perceiving the US strikes as a violation of the country’s sovereignty,
Iraqis may, alongside Iranians, be one of the few who, perhaps self-servingly,
factor adherence to international law in their debates.
In line with
the comments of Messrs. Freeman and Kagan, the legal aspects of Mr. Soleimani’s
killing take on a significance that goes far beyond the Middle East in an
environment in which civilizational leaders like India’s Narendra Modi, China’s
Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Myanmar’s Win Myint flout
international law with impunity.
Violations
of international law grounded in propagation of concepts of a civilizational
rather than a nation state that defines its borders not in terms of
internationally recognized frontiers, but blurry lines of civilizational reach,
have occurred in recent years fast and furious.
Iraqi
assertions of a US violation of sovereignty echo Russia’s 2014 annexation of
Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine. Mr. Trump has ignored United
Nations Security Council resolutions by unilaterally recognizing Israeli
annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
Mr. Mynt
stands accused of ethnic cleansing by the United Nations that has prompted
hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh. Massive evidence
documents Mr. Jinping’s authorization of the brutal repression of Turkic
Muslims in the troubled north-western Chinese province of Xinjiang while Mr.
Modi appears to be progressively disenfranchising his country’s Muslim
minority.
For his
part, Mr. Soleimani is believed to have been responsible for numerous incidents
of political violence, including a 2012 attack on tourists in Bulgaria executed by a Lebanese suicide
bomber. Five of the six casualties were Israelis.
Adopting the
principle of might is right, civilizational leaders’ abandonment of
international law, including guarantees of basic and minority rights, risks
creating a global jungle in which wars, political violence, marginalization of
ethnic and religious groups, and destabilizing mass migration contribute to
rule of the jungle rather than rule of law.
So do
Western approaches adopted almost two decades ago in the wake of the 9/11
attacks on New York and Washington.
Said at the
time Robert Cooper, a British diplomat, former advisor to prime minister Tony
Blair, current advisor to the European Commission on Myanmar, and a proponent
of the doctrine of a new liberal imperialism who in 2011 defended Bahrain’s
brutal repression of a popular uprising:
If the world
has a civilized core that deserves lawful conduct, there also is a barbarous periphery
that warrants “rougher methods of an earlier era… Postmodern states operate on
the basis of laws and open co-operative security” but “in the jungle, one must use the laws
of the jungle.”
Some two decades
after Mr. Cooper wrote those words, the jungle rather than the rule of law
threatens to become the norm, putting the global community on a dangerous and
slippery slope.
Dr. James
M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S.
Rajaratnam School of International Studies, an adjunct senior research fellow
at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and co-director
of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture
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