A confederacy of dunces defends George W. Bush’s axis of evil

The new decade has begun by dialling back the years to a time the West was dangerously naive. Jihad denialism is back with a vengeance and the usual suspects are reverting to type.

The same determined naivety about Islamist terror that empowered jihadis to enter the US and attack the World Trade Centre is back in vogue. In the sequel, Iranian Islamists and their proxy militia are victims of US terror; slain Iranian Revolutionary Guard Commander Qassem Soleimani is a folk hero; and the nuclear threats of North Korea’s communist dictator Kim Jong-un are a response to US provocation.

The festive season was littered with threats from North Korea, Iran and Iraq. The three nations have engaged in dishonourable conduct for so long that they have earned the moniker “axis of evil”. In his 2002 State of the Union address, former US president George W. Bush used the term to describe the states’ history of sponsoring terror, depriving their own citizens of freedom, developing weapons of mass destruction and threatening peace in the world.

The axis-of-evil speech was delivered less than six months after the September 11 attacks in which Islamist terrorists hijacked planes and killed 2977 people in the US. The youngest was toddler Christine Lee Hanson, 2, who was killed when jihadis flew into World Trade Centre 2. The founder of Islamist terror group al-Qa’ida, Osama bin Laden, orchestrated the 9/11 attacks. It took nearly a decade for the US military to track him down because Islamic countries offered him refuge. He was killed by the US military in Pakistan on May 2, 2011.

The strike on Soleimani is the latest in a series of strategic counter-terrorism activities conducted during the Trump presidency. Last September, the White House confirmed Osama bin Laden’s son Hamza had died in a US counter-terrorism operation. On October 27, US special operations forces located Islamic State terrorist leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who used his children as a human shield before killing them and himself with a suicide vest.

Soleimani was also a terrorist but his official role in the Iranian government and history of working with the US to contain Sunni jihadi groups complicates matters. Former Mossad director Tamir Pardo offered a useful distinction by separating Soleimani’s professional life into two periods; before and after the Arab Spring. Speaking to The New York Times, Pardo said: ‘‘Until the Arab Spring, he is commander of a force that has branches in various parts of the world, active mainly in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, but at the end of the day is a secret operational organisation whose main purpose is terrorism.”

Soleimani had become a powerful regional figure by exploiting the “secret infrastructure” established over years to achieve clear objectives: “To fight, to win, to establish presence.”

US President Donald Trump justified the drone strike that killed Soleimani. He said that for years, the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had deliberately maimed and murdered American civilians and servicemen. Recent attacks included the December hit on an Iraqi military base that killed a US contractor and injured several servicemen. The US held Iranian-backed militia group Kataib Hezbollah responsible for the attack and conducted strikes against the group two days later. Iran threatened “consequences” in retaliation. On December 31, pro-Iranian paramilitary groups stormed the US Embassy in Baghdad. They occupied it until New Year’s Day.

After receiving intelligence that Iran and proxy militia groups were planning further attacks on allied interests, the US took pre-emptive action with the drone strike that killed Soleimani along with deputy commander of Iran-backed militia group, the Popular Mobilisation Forces.

Despite decades of fighting terrorism, the Western romance with Islamism is not over. In a New Yorker piece, Soleimani was described as: “A flamboyant former construction worker and bodybuilder with white hair, a dapper beard, and arching salt-and-pepper eyebrows.” The ABC ran a headline that described him as “hero to many”. So too was Adolf Hitler, but we tend to recall him more fittingly as a genocidal tyrant. The insightful analysis in the article was punctuated by a curious depiction of the slain jihadi: “The son of a farmer, from a poor area in eastern Iran, Qassem Soleimani was softly spoken, calculating and lethal, leaving an extraordinary mark on a region accustomed to the failings of big men with big mouths.”

The UN’s contribution was disappointing, as one would expect. UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killing, Agnes Callamard, tweeted the drone strike was “most likely unlawful and violates international human rights law”. How many innocents must die before their right to life matters more than a jihadi’s right to kill?

The EU flexed its muscle with a strongly worded statement about unnamed actors, unspecified events and an invitation for more dialogue. High Representative Josep Borrell said the violence in Iraq “must be stopped”. Note the use of passive tense. Trump is drawing battlelines in the Middle East in part because the Eurocrat elites wash their hands of reality when it disturbs their sense of peace. They wait for the US to do Europe’s dirty work and then complain about the consequences. If Eurocrats don’t want Trump to unleash the dogs of war, they must recognise that soft power has limits and Iran has exceeded them.

Soleimani’s last act against freedom was to approve the attacks on the US Embassy in Baghdad. He was a venerated member of the Iranian elite. That tells us all we need to know as Iran is a despotic regime intent on Islamist encirclement, the export of terror, the violation of human rights and the violent suppression of dissent. It is a coward state that lurks in the shadows using proxy militia and asymmetric warfare to destabilise democracy and snuff out people’s will to freedom across the Islamic world. The West does not want another war in the Middle East, but we cannot accept a future where freedom is the price we pay for peace.