Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Trump administration’s claims that it assassinated Gen. Qasem Soleimani because he posed an imminent threat to American lives and was coming to Baghdad to launch an immediate attack the US embassy there have fallen apart. Commentators are suggesting that the “imminent threat” argument is the equivalent for the Trump administration of the “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) claim of the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq War.
Trump himself and figures in his administration such as secretary of defense Mark Esper have repeatedly failed to provide any evidence of the imminence of any threat.
It is easy to demonize Soleimani in the US, since he certainly was an enemy of US interests in the Middle East for much of his career. But he does not appear to have killed or had killed any Americans at all in the past decade, and from 2015 because of the UN Security Council nuclear deal with Iran, Soleimani was not an adversary of the US in recent years. In fact, he was often a de facto ally and the US Air Force gave him air support at Tikrit and elsewhere in the campaign against ISIL (ISIS, Daesh). In fact, for a while there Soleimani was fighting ISIL and al-Qaeda-linked militias in Syria in tacit alliance with the Kurds supported by the United States at a time when Israel allied with an al-Qaeda affiliate in the Golan Heights.