In the early morning hours of Jan. 3, a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper shot a missile into a car carrying Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian general who had, for more than two decades, led the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, an elite unit dedicated to the “export of revolution.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the strike on Soleimani “provocative and disproportionate.” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff snapped, “I don’t know what the president’s motivation here is, but I think it was a reckless decision.” “World War III” began trending on Twitter, and university students panicked that college loans could make them draft-eligible.
Prior to his killing, most Americans, and even many politicians, may have never heard of Soleimani’s name. But the events leading the United States and Iran to this point were decades in the making.
Soleimani was as much an anti-American ideologue as he was a general. In the heady years before the revolution, he rapidly radicalized and regularly attended anti-American sermons. He joined the newly formed Revolutionary Guard at the earliest opportunity. His fervor and acumen led him to rise quickly through the ranks, as did the viciousness with which he helped organize the suppression of Kurdish and Azeri unrest during the first years of revolutionary turmoil. During the subsequent Iran-Iraq War, he fought in almost every campaign, both proving his mettle and gaining military experience. Yahya Rahim Safavi appointed Soleimani to be Quds Force chief in 1998, just months after Safavi’s own appointment as head of the Guard.
The rise of Mohammad Khatami to the presidency of Iran overshadowed Soleimani’s assumption of control over the Quds Force. American and European diplomats applauded Khatami’s call for a “dialogue of civilizations” but seldom considered that Khatami might only have been the good cop to Soleimani’s bad cop. It was under Khatami that the Islamic Republic doubled down on its then-secret investment in a military nuclear program.
Behind the scenes, Khatami and his team were forthright about their strategy. His spokesman, Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, for example, talked about the reformist deception strategy in a 2008 debate at the University of Gilan in northern Iran. “We should prove to the entire world that we want power plants for electricity,” he said, referring to Iran’s nuclear motivations. “Afterwards, we can proceed with other activities.” He likewise described dialogue as an elaborate deception strategy. “We had an overt policy, which was one of negotiation and confidence-building, and a covert policy, which was a continuation of the activities.”
While Madeleine Albright’s State Department believed in Khatami’s sincerity and sought broad détente, the European Union did not first wait to see a change in Iranian behavior. In 1992, German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel launched a policy of “critical engagement” in which the EU would flood Iran with trade in order to tie it closer to the international community, while simultaneously discussing difficult issues such as human rights and terrorism. Between 1998 and 2005, EU trade with Iran almost tripled, while, over the same period, oil prices quintupled. Given that the Guard and its affiliated companies dominated both the oil industry and the sectors in which Europeans sought to trade, this meant that Soleimani took the helm of the Quds Force at a time when it was flooded with cash like never before, providing him with a perfect opportunity to advance his agenda.
That he did with fervor. Vice President Mike Pence was correct to allude to Soleimani collusion with al Qaeda before 9/11. While the 9/11 Commission Report did not mention Soleimani by name, it did confirm that Iran facilitated the travel of most of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers to and from al Qaeda training camps. Such activity falls solely under the purview of the Quds Force. That in the wake of 9/11, the Guard sheltered on its bases key al Qaeda leaders such as Nazih Abdul-Hamed al Ruqai, accused in the 1998 East African embassy bombings, and Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law and former spokesman, underscores Soleimani’s culpability.
Critics of the decision to kill Soleimani suggest that his death destroyed any possibility of détente with Tehran. Republican Sen. Rand Paul called Soleimani’s demise “the death of diplomacy” and voiced a fear that it might not be possible to resume talks with Iran “for a lifetime.”
In reality, though, it was Soleimani who consistently undercut diplomacy. Consider the Israel-Palestine dispute, a conflict which many American diplomats and their European counterparts say is central to the lack of peace and security across the Middle East. On Jan. 3, 2002, Israeli commandos intercepted the MV Karine A in the Red Sea. Onboard were 50 tons of weaponry that the Guard had onloaded from one of its facilities on Kish Island in the Persian Gulf. The timing of the Karine A’s transit was crucial. Soleimani had weapons onloaded and shipped in order to scuttle a ceasefire to the 2000-2005 Palestinian uprising after diplomats had spent months trying to achieve a pause in the violence. Simply put, Soleimani threw gasoline on the embers as the international community sought to extinguish the fire.
Nor was the Karine A an isolated case. On Nov. 4, 2009, the Israeli Navy intercepted the MV Francop in the Eastern Mediterranean as it sought to smuggle 320 tons of weaponry to Hezbollah. Soleimani was triumphant. “Yesterday, there were Palestinians with stones, but today, there is Palestine armed with missiles … The events provide our revolution with the greatest opportunities. Today, Iran’s victory or defeat no longer takes place in Mehran and Khorramshahr. Our boundaries have expanded, and we must witness victory in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria.”
Most Americans heard of Soleimani only in the context of the Iraq War. Here, too, it is important to understand how Soleimani was not the product of Iraqi chaos, but rather the cause of it. Shortly before Operation Iraqi Freedom began in March 2003, U.S. diplomat Ryan Crocker and White House official Zalmay Khalilzad met secretly in Geneva with Iran’s then-U.N. ambassador (and current Foreign Minister), Mohammad Javad Zarif. Simultaneously, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw met with his Iranian equivalent, Kamal Kharrazi. The agenda was the same: Iranian diplomats pledged noninterference in Iraq and promised not to insert Guard troops or the proxy forces they trained. Either Zarif and Kharrazi lied, or they were powerless to implement the agreement they negotiated in the face of Soleimani’s efforts to wage war on America. In April 2003, Iranian journalist Ali Reza Nourizadeh subsequently documented the surprise of Khatami and his allies at “the decision issued above their heads to send into Iraq more than 2,000 fighters, clerics, and students [to] the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and al-Dawa Party.”
It was at this time that Iran appointed Hassan Kazemi Qomi, a longtime Quds Force operative, to be its ambassador in Baghdad. When the U.S. returned sovereignty to Iraq in June 2004 and Qomi presented his credentials to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, members of Talabani’s family said it was comical how Qomi pretended to be a diplomat, as they all had known him as their Quds Force contact during their own insurgency against Saddam Hussein. Soleimani and Qomi proceeded to smuggle in and distribute improvised explosive devices and the explosive projectiles that killed hundreds of Americans.
It was during this immediate postwar period that the Quds Force founded and trained many of the Iran-directed Shiite militias that fueled sectarianism in Iraq. In 2003, Iranian forces in Iraq, for example, founded Kataib Hezbollah, which repeatedly attacked both the Green Zone and U.S. bases in Iraq. (Kataib Hezbollah’s leader, Abu Mahdi al Muhandis, died in the drone strike alongside Soleimani). There’s Asaib Ahl-e al Haq, which in 2007, a year after Soleimani helped found it, kidnapped four American soldiers from the Karbala provincial headquarters building and executed them. Soleimani regularly accompanied Badr Corps head Hadi Amiri, who bragged about attacking American forces and told me last summer that he considered them legitimate targets.
More recently, Soleimani was at the forefront of efforts to organize Pakistani and Afghan Shiites into new militias similar to the Iraqi Shiite groups or Hezbollah in order to expand the Quds Force’s reach across the Middle East and South Asia. And while American pundits question the extent of Iranian command-and-control over Houthi rebels in Yemen, in January 2015, Ali Shirazi, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s special representative to the Quds Force, bragged that “the Houthis are a version of Hezbollah, and this group will use the stage for confronting the enemies of Islam.”
Soleimani’s death does not mean war with Iran is imminent any more than bin Laden’s death meant war with Pakistan. And while some critics of President Trump’s hit on Soleimani said the two cases are not equivalent since Soleimani held a state position and bin Laden was a member of an unrepentant terrorist group, such a comparison does less to absolve Soleimani than expose Iran’s revolutionary regime for its true nature. Vowing to stop “endless war” is a noble goal, but it was not the U.S. that was waging a unilateral war against Iran, but rather Iran, in the guise of General Soleimani, who was waging an endless war against the U.S. On Jan. 3, his war ended.
Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
