Killing Soleimani

If you thought 2019 was suffering from a time-compression effect, where every day seemed like a month and every month a year, it looks like 2020 is going to be more of the same.

Last night, US helicopters or drones attacked a convoy outside the Baghdad airport in Iraq. The convoy was transporting several several leaders of the Iraqi Shia militia that Washington blamed for Tuesday's siege of the US embassy in Baghdad, but also Major-General Qassem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran. Later that evening, US President Donald Trump confirmed Soleimani was the target of the operation. Seems like several high-ranking militia leaders were just a bonus objective, so to speak.

I won't get into whether Soleimani was a terrorist - as the American Empire claims - or not. There is ample evidence that his forces contributed massively to the defeat of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, however, and among the people celebrating his death are some of the vilest neocon warmongers known to humanity, including the crew responsible for the 2003 invasion of Iraq that was a prima facie crime against peace.

There is no doubt, however, that the hit was a quintessentially imperial act. What else do you call assassinating someone who is traveling openly with diplomatic papers, in a country where the US is not at war and its troops only have a tenuous legal pretext for being present? States care about sovereignty, legality and legitimacy; empires do not.

What's especially ironic is that, while he acts like the God-Emperor of memes abroad, Trump is the polar opposite at home, either powerless or unwilling to do anything - aside from tweeting - about the media-Democrat-Deep State complex that is relentlessly persecuting his supporters, or anyone who dares step out of the ever-shifting line they keep redrawing.

One would think the domestic "Resistance" would be a lot more circumspect with an Emperor that is willing to be this ruthless abroad, but they're not. That should tell you a thing or three about the real character of the Empire, and the extent of Trump's actual power.