Did Trump Do the Right Thing with Iran?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/opinion/trump-iran-suleimani.html

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Nothing unites Washington like war. But then nothing divides it, and scrambles it, quite like Donald Trump.

A Republican senator called the administration’s defense of the president’s decision to kill Iran’s most powerful commander, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, with a drone strike on Iraqi soil “absolutely insane.” A Democratic senator, evoking the rhetorical stylings of George W. Bush, called Iran a nation “full of malevolent evildoers.” People are still trying to make sense of what happened and what it will mean: Was it justified ethically? Was it wise strategically?

I’ve read more than 30 articles on the debate. Here are the points worth paying attention to.

General Suleimani’s death deals a huge blow to Iran’s plans for regional domination, writes Hassan Hassan, the director of the nonstate actors program at the Center for Global Policy.

“His work took a long time to bear fruit in Iraq and Lebanon, but he had not yet had the same time nor secured the same connections in such places as Syria and Yemen,” he says.

“His death does not mark the end of Iran’s hegemonic project, but it does serve a heavy blow to the regime’s ability to expand its influence and deal with erupting crises.”

General Suleimani’s assassination could also open the door to diplomacy, says Ian Bremmer, a political scientist and the president of Eurasia Group. Mr. Bremmer notes that Mr. Trump took a similar tack of escalation when he threatened Mexico with tariffs if it didn’t tighten its border, which it eventually vowed to do. He tweeted:

The strike was necessary because the United States’ deterrence strategy with Iran wasn’t working, Marc A. Thiessen, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, writes in The Washington Post.

“Iran had been carrying out increasingly bold attacks — attacking Japanese and Norwegian oil tankers, then an unmanned U.S. drone and then Saudi oil facilities,” he writes. “Our lack of serious response emboldened Iran to escalate further.”

General Suleimani’s killing shows that “Trump is serious about enforcing his red line” against killing Americans and “creating a measure of deterrence,” writes Max Boot in The Washington Post. “Other international actors, including North Korea, will now be more wary of provoking Trump.”

[Related: The case for killing Qassim Suleimani]

This apparent victory seems to have been won at a reasonable cost, argue the editors of National Review, since Iran’s retaliation, at least for now, was limited and caused no American casualties.

The assassination of General Suleimani was wrong, writes Greg Shupak in Jacobin. “The United States has no right to bomb other countries, to try to overthrow governments, or to assassinate other states’ officials, though it has been doing so for so long that these practices have come to be widely accepted as natural,” he writes, noting how the United States orchestrated the coup in 1953 that overthrew Iran’s democracy.

The assassination was also illegal, argues Karen Greenberg in The Times. “In employing the euphemism ‘targeted killing’ for a member of a sovereign state,” she writes, “the Trump administration has exposed the faulty assumptions and dangerous legacy posed by the war on terror’s targeted killing policy.” (Gerald Ford banned assassination in 1976, but succeeding presidents have simply narrowed the definition of assassination.)

The policy has unacceptable implications, writes Ryan Cooper: “If it’s fine to kill Iranian statesmen while they are traveling to a peace conference, in public and undefended, then it’s fine for Iran (or some other power) to blow up, say, Vice President Pence when he is on a diplomatic trip to Ireland or somewhere.”

Both parties are to blame for executive overreach, writes Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran and the president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, calling Congress “pusillanimous and supine” for having long since forfeited its constitutional authority to make and unmake war.

The Democrats complaining “deserve not a respectful hearing but contempt,” he writes, for “their behavior over the past decade and more in giving presidents a free hand to wage war however they see fit cannot be described as anything but cowardly.”

"It was, after all, President Obama who pioneered the role of assassin-in-chief to which Trump has now laid claim.”

The real question to ask about the assassination was not whether it was justified, but whether it was wise, writes The Times editorial board. General Suleimani was “indisputably an enemy of the American people,” they write, but the administration has offered no specific evidence of the “imminent threat” it said General Suleimani posed to the United States or how his death supposedly resolved it.

Instead, Trump has only produced a more dangerous Iran, Vali Nasr, a Middle East scholar at Johns Hopkins University, told The Times’s Michelle Goldberg.

“Already,” Ms. Goldberg writes, “NATO has suspended its mission training Iraqi forces to fight ISIS. Iraq’s Parliament has voted to expel American troops — a longtime Iranian objective.”

A country that was recently fractured by protests and a brutal crackdown will now unify behind the regime, which has already named General Suleimani’s successor, says Narges Bajoghli in The Times.

There is no hope now to revive the Iran nuclear deal, writes Susan Rice, the national security adviser to Barack Obama. Iran announced that it would stop observing the deal’s restrictions on its nuclear fuel production.

“We must expect Iran will accelerate its efforts to revive its nuclear program without constraint,” she writes.

“Iran has cast off nuclear curbs so that it is now potentially within five months of having enough fuel for a nuclear warhead, down from almost 15 years when Trump took office,” says The Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

The biggest losers will be the Iranian people, writes Barbara Slavin. “The Iranian regime will not fall but will be more ruthless than ever, seeing American plots against it around every corner,” she predicts. “The regime will outlast President Trump, and so, unfortunately, will the devastation caused by his actions.

[Related: “I’m Iranian American. I’m tired of being treated like a political pawn.”]

There was reason on Wednesday for relief that the United States and Iran had avoided a plunge into full-scale war, writes The Washington Post’s editorial board. “But Mr. Trump’s manifest lack of clear goals or strategy in the Middle East, combined with his readiness to launch strikes or order troop movements on impulse, is cause for continued alarm,” they write.

The United States should still be worried, Ilan Goldenberg, a senior fellow and director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, told Jen Kirby at Vox. Iran could still launch cyberattacks or terrorist attacks, target American embassies or assassinate American officials, he says. “I think all those things are entirely on the table for potentially years, frankly, in retaliation.”

Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.

When is killing an assassination? [The New York Times]

Vali Nasr explains the meaning of General Suleimani’s death in the Middle East. [The New Yorker]

Dexter Filkins wrote an in-depth profile of General Suleimani in 2013. [The New Yorker]

Can Trump make foreign policy a Democratic campaign issue? [The New York Times]

Here’s what readers had to say about the last debate, The crucial lessons from Australia’s wildfires.

Robert from Australia: “The core problem is the continuing massive subsidies to fossil fuels (estimated by the I.M.F. to top $5.2 trillion in 2017) and fossil fuel money pouring into lobbying and political campaigns around the world.”

Tina from Canada (via email): “What’s being neglected is just how disheartening and absolutely demoralizing living through wildfires can be. I live in British Columbia and during wildfire season, previously tranquil, blue skies are gagged with thick and impenetrable fleets of smoke that don’t subside for months. There is no light, only a stale-yellow dimness when you go outside. The sun becomes this scorched, red-hot circle that makes it seem like the end of the world.”

Mike from Oregon: “I think for the record, global warming should be stated in Fahrenheit for Americans, who can’t seem to deal with the metric system.”