11 - Iran, Proxy Warfare and the Tradition of State Sovereignty

Summary

Introduction

On 2 January 2020, the United States launched a drone strike near Iraq's Baghdad airport, killing Iranian General Qasim Suleimani under the pretext of preventing an imminent attack on US troops in the region. As head of the Quds Force, the military wing of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Suleimani was held in high esteem throughout Iran, a revered figure whom many considered more powerful than the President, Hassan Rouhani. Imagine, for a moment, that Iran sent a drone to assassinate Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley as he arrived in Baghdad to meet with an Iraqi potentate. The United States would have surely considered such an attack an unprovoked act of war, responding in kind. Or, what if a Russian general was about to launch an attack against US allies in Syria, one that would also endanger American lives? Would the US government consider a pre-emptive drone strike? Probably not.

Such thought experiments are compounded by myriad other factors, of course. Still, that the United States openly killed a top government official of a sovereign state on another sovereign state's territory seems shocking. That many American pundits did not question the legitimacy of assassinating a state official and instead focused on the strategic implications of the assassination is equally telling (for example, Ward, 2020; Goldenberg, 2020). What makes Iran more deserving than other state actors of treatment that has been prohibited – at least normatively – between states for decades?

One answer, and certainly one that the Trump administration proffered at the time, was that Suleimani and his Quds Force were terrorists. Since 9/11, the terrorist moniker has come with a host of legal ‘permissions’ that basically equate such actors to cancers in need of excision: too irrational, too ideological, too fanatical for the rule of law. In truth, the Islamic Republic of Iran has carried some form of this mantle – if not in practice, then in perception – since the 1979 revolution and the subsequent US embassy hostage crisis. At first glance, many American officials appear to have equated these historical acts to a sort of abdication of legitimate state-ness.