Killing of man of blood and iron Qassem Soleimani brings world to the edge

‘Dark warrior’: Qassem Soleimani in Tehran in 2016. Picture: AP

It’s an extraordinary thing that the world has been brought to the edge of general fear by the assassination of the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, on the orders of Donald Trump, and what an extraordinary character he sounds.

In Saturday’s The Weekend Australian David Kilcullen, who wrote that authoritative Quarterly Essay about Islamic State, described him as “a towering figure”. There’s no doubting it, however much he was the sworn enemy of America and the West, of Israel and any Sunni influence in Iraq. We don’t have to cast this heroical villain as a good guy to realise what a dazzling man of war he was. He went into battle with his troops and in a rare moment of alliance with America he drove Islamic State across the face of Syria, controlling the ground war while America attacked from the sky. Yes, he was the ally of the despicable Bashar al-Assad, but he was also the enemy of the Saudis, those fat cats of terror responsible for the most extreme and dangerous forms of Islamism. His forces attacked them the other week.

He was a man of absolute blood and iron –– a figure comparable in stature and personal charisma to great Israeli general, Moshe Dayan. He stood for much that we loathe and fear but he stood for it like a colossus. Never mind that we necessarily perceive his potency as at best amoral and in the end black evil. He was the most formidable figure in the recent history of the Middle East, fomenting terror and Iranian influence wherever he could: through Hezbollah, through the factions in predominantly Shi’ite Iraq.

David Petraeus, the US commander of the Surge, loathed Soleimani, who as long ago as the end of the 1990s directed Hezbollah’s war against Israel’s occupation of Lebanon that he drove the Israelis to forsake it. He once sent a text to the American commander saying, “General Petraeus you should know that I Qassem Soleimani control Iranian policy in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Gaza and Afghanistan”. And then in 2018 he said to President Donald Trump, with all the mock modesty he could muster, that it was beneath the dignity of the President of Iran to respond to the American braggart: “I, speaking simply as a soldier, give you this answer.”

Others report that the modesty was no simple pose. He could sit at meetings silent, the dark brows under the white hair raised, saying nothing while everyone tried, in vain, to read his thoughts. He could also, in the Arabic which he continued to speak with a Persian accent (though his mastery of it was very deliberate), say: “We are near you in a place you cannot even imagine. We are prepared. In this arena we are the man.”

And so he was. There’s as little point in denying it as there is in imagining that this man of flint, this detester of Israel and America and Saudi Arabia, was an old dear.

It’s difficult to quarrel with Alan Dershowitz’s defence of the legality of Trump’s decision to take out Soleimani as opposed to its viability of strategic risk. You can see why he invokes the precedent of Bill Clinton trying to have Osama bin Laden assassinated long before 9/11.

But it certainly makes you wonder that both George W. Bush and Barack Obama contemplated having Soleimani eliminated but decided the risk from the aftershock was too great and too unpredictable.

Certainly the world has trembled. In Iran itself –– bizarrely –– more than 50 people died as a consequence of a stampede amid the massive crowd that filled the streets for his funeral.

Has Trump’s knockout blow against the great Iranian man of war and terror worked? Who knows? Indications are –– for instance, from Martha Raddatz’s interview with the Iranian Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, on American ABC television –– that the Iranian response will stay cautious as with the retaliatory attack on the American bases in Iraq. But the long-term effect is incalculable.

Soleimani was a man who commanded the respect of his foes. The one-time head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, Tamir Pardo, was quoted by The New York Times as saying that the career of Soleimani fell into two phases. Before the Arab Spring he was a spymaster and a master terrorist. After it, “he becomes a kingpin player” using what was once a secret infrastructure “to achieve non-covert objectives –– to fight, to win, to establish presence”.

He and his Quds Force, the crack contingent of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, was a massive machine for the Iran­isation of the Middle East just as it was against Islamic State. His mindset and convictions seem to have derived from the terrible Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s; an unspeakably horrible World War I-style conflict in which Soleimani was constantly on the front watching thousands upon thousands die. All his life was dominated by the attempt to subdue Iraq. He seems to have been an ascetic character and he was bored by Islamic obsessions with appropriate costumery. God looks on all, whatever the head gear, was his attitude.

We do not treasure soldiers like Oliver Cromwell, who effected the massacre of Drogheda in 17th century Ireland, or William Tecumseh Sherman, who burnt down Georgia systematically in the name of the Union side in the American Civil War.

But we acknowledge them as part of the flaming bloody horror of our history.

Would it have been a bright idea to take out Hermann Goering, that WWI air ace and charmer, in 1937?

One of the creepier aspects of this story is that the Iranians themselves prayed that Soleimani would be granted the supreme prize we have awarded him. They actually prayed for this dark warrior to get the crown of martyrdom.

You just hope in this horror story that God is on our –– and, God help us –– Trump’s side.

Peter Craven is a culture critic and was the founding editor of Quarterly Essay.