The Law
of the Jungle
A shadow over West Asia
Ali Alizadeh
A year has passed since the assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad Airport on the direct orders of the President of the United State, Donald J. Trump. Much has been said about the importance of Soleimani’s role in the politics of West Asia but in light of unrelenting efforts by the overwhelming majority of American-Israeli-Saudi media to misrepresent and Soleimani, it is necessary to reiterate a few basic points when reflecting upon his legacy.
Firstly, despite the US government officially designating Soleimani a terrorist, let’s ask how West Asia would have looked in January 2021 if Soleimani and his regional allies had not helped to mobilize popular forces against US troops in Iraq? Or if they had not fought against further Balkanization of the region in Syria?
In order to answer these questions we need to revisit the hubris of American neoconservatives twenty years ago, when they were determined to blaze through West Asia and redraw the map as their colonial cousins had done eighty years previously following WWI, most infamously exemplified in the Sykes–Picot Agreement. One just needs to revisit the Project for the New American Century to remind oneself of the complacency, arrogance and delusions of grandeur of these warmongering neocons. As reported by Supreme Allied Commander of Europe for NATO, General Wesley Clark, the neoconservatives were “to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” Soleimani played a crucial role in bringing these delusions of American empire crashing back down to earth and demonstrated that such naked imperiousness would not be met with passivity and indifference, but resolute and stern resistance. His name came to symbolize resistance to the fantasy of a “New American Century” as he played a crucial role in supporting those in the region who chafed under the yoke of American military occupation and sought to deter any future western force from pursuing such reckless adventurism ever again. This American fantasy soon gave way to an American nightmare which cost America, in the words of Donald Trump at least 4 trillion dollars and contributed to its ongoing decline as the world’s last true empire. Undoubtedly, Soleimani’s strategic acumen and symbolic significance explain the profound hatred felt by the American establishment towards him as well as cowardly way in which he was assassinated in violation of international law.
The second point is the way that Soleimani is portrayed in the western media as the posterboy for Iran’s aggressive, expansionist regional policy and its alleged reinvention of a chauvinistic neo-Safavid Shi’i empire, motivated by fundamentalist religious ideology. But in stark contrast to such partisan hyperbole, Soleimani was first and foremost the outcome of the traumatic experience of eight years of war imposed on Iran by Saddam Hussein and supported by the West during the 1980s. A war which Iran fought virtually alone, while Saddam was supported not only by major western powers and many Arab countries, but also by the Soviet Union. Soleimani in many ways harbored the memory of a nation which lost more than 230 thousand of its young men. This collective and institutional memory saw the world remain silent as Saddam deployed chemical weapons against Iranian forces and Kurdish civilians, all the while continuing to supply him with arms and diplomatic cover. In short, Soleimani was an explicit product of the experience of Iran’s regional isolation during a brutal interstate war imposed on Iran and the realization of the vital necessity of creating a robust system of defence and deterrence to the end of basic survival. (One can even argue that he put his life on the line in Syria because he could remember that in the 8 years war Syria was the only country in the region which remained an ally of Iran.)
Finally Soleimani brought an end to US exceptionalism in West Asia and marked the end of America’s ability to act cost free and with impunity in the region. These perpetrators of this illegal act are yet to meet with retribution even as the US is increasingly wary of Iran’s strategic patience and sees every passing day as one of possible payback. Soleimani’s strategic wherewithal did not disappear with his death, but has become an integral part of Iran’s security and deterrence doctrine. And it is in this regard that he continues to cast a long shadow over the region from Lebanon to Afghanistan, alive and ready to strike at any moment.