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LEBANON'S EXPLOSION: A NEW HUMANITARIAN DRAMA?

Beirut Explosion Imperils Lebanon’s Refugee Population—and Aid Routes to Syria

Reeling from the aftermath of a chemical explosion in the city’s port, Lebanon’s most vulnerable are bracing for even more anguish.

BY KELLY KIMBALL, ROBBIE GRAMER, JACK DETSCH

 | FOREIGN POLICY, AUGUST 11, 2020, 3:48 PM

 

The massive explosion that rocked Beirut and destroyed much of the Lebanese capital’s port last week threatens to have disastrous consequences for the roughly 1.5 million Syrian and Palestinian refugees who have long relied on humanitarian aid in the country, according to officials and aid workers who spoke to Foreign Policy. 

Lebanon hosts one of the highest populations of refugees in the world. The blast last week came on the heels of months of civil unrest, an economy on the brink of collapse if not beyond it, and a resurgent coronavirus pandemic. Experts and humanitarian workers say it further imperils Lebanon’s refugee population, half of whom lived in deep poverty before all the crises began. More than half of Palestinian refugees are unemployed, and over two-thirds of Syrian refugees in Lebanon live below the poverty line. 

“They were already vulnerable, not just because of their situation as refugees but also because of the spiraling economic crisis and coronavirus crisis and measures that had impacted the whole country,” said Ruth Hetherington, the Middle East spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross. “For everybody, this catastrophe layers more misery on top of already very deep crises.”

Many refugees from the nearly decadelong civil war in Syria are spread out across Lebanon’s farmlands, but without the prospect of a flow of international aid to help them in Lebanon, things will get worse—for them and for their host country.

“It’s hard to see how they can absorb any more, and it will be increasingly difficult to take care of those they have been hosting,” said Andrew Miller, a former National Security Council director during the Obama administration. “It really does make the absence of an off-ramp to these conflicts and the return of refugees a ticking time bomb, at least from Lebanon’s perspective,” said Miller, now the deputy director for policy at Project on Middle East Democracy. 

The Lebanese government had already sought to repatriate refugees in recent years, despite lingering dangers in their home countries. Now, some fear that Lebanon, faced with no money, little food, and a massive reconstruction bill, will take it out on that vulnerable population.

“The situation for a full-fledged citizen in Lebanon was already extremely dire,” said Bachir Ayoub, a Beirut-based expert with the humanitarian organization Oxfam. “You can only imagine the impact it would have on the refugee community.” 

The biggest immediate problem in the wake of the explosion is food, at a time when prices for food and other goods had nearly doubled in Lebanon over the past year. The Beirut port, an entry point for much of what Lebanon consumes and a key hub for other shipments throughout the region, will be inoperable for at least a month, a United Nations spokesperson said. Lebanon imports 80 to 85 percent of its food, and one of its largest grain silos was among the wreckage. 

U.N. and humanitarian officials also fear the knock-on effects of the explosion on the aid pipeline to Syria, where over 11 million people rely on international aid to survive as the country’s civil war grinds into its ninth year. 

The Beirut port “was one of the main logistical hubs” through which the U.N. and other aid organizations sent supplies to Syria, Ayoub said. Now humanitarian officials are scrambling to find ways to keep the supply chain open as the dust settles on the destroyed port.

Aid officials are looking to Lebanon’s other main port, Tripoli, where aid will continue to arrive via air freight or ship. But it’s unclear whether the U.N. and other aid organizations that had used Beirut’s port as a gateway to provide aid to the region can do the same from Tripoli, which has only about one-third the capacity of the port in Beirut.

Another problem is the lack of a proper government in Lebanon, after the entire leadership resigned en masse on Monday. The resignation of Prime Minister Hassan Diab and his entire cabinet won’t stop the flow of humanitarian aid into the country, but it could make efforts to unlock long-term international aid pledges more challenging, experts told Foreign Policy. Diab’s resignation means that his government will have caretaker status, giving it just enough legal power to run day-to-day functions but not allowing it to enact reforms demanded by Western nations. 

“The Lebanese financial system is completely broken, you cannot transfer money in and out of the country,” said Heiko Wimmen, a project director for the International Crisis Group overseeing Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. “The banks are completely bankrupt.” 

So far, Lebanon has seen a muted response from the United States and the international community. A French-backed online conference over the weekend garnered nearly $300 million in donations, well short of the $15 billion in damage wreaked by last week’s blast, and potential contributors have pushed for reforms to Lebanon’s government, accused of endemic corruption. 

The U.S. Embassy in Beirut reported on Tuesday that the Trump administration had so far provided $2 million in food and medical supplies. But the Trump administration, which supplies hundreds of millions of dollars annually in military and economic aid to Lebanon, never embraced the Diab government, and has called for reforms before pitching in major contributions. The National reported that a U.S.-led delegation to the country will make the push for an independent government and other reforms when it visits the country later this week.

Another potential hurdle to more aid from Washington is the Trump administration’s antipathy to the United Nations.

“They’re deeply distrustful of the U.N. Their preference is to provide aid bilaterally or through orgs that are not part of the U.N. structure,” Miller said. “Unless you already have the mechanisms in place to provide aid, you have to build them from scratch.”

If there’s one tiny silver lining to the short-term government vacuum, aid experts say, it’s an easing of restrictions that normally apply to imported goods. Lebanon, for instance, used to reject medicine that had expiration dates more than a year away. That restriction may be lifted, allowing for the import of medicines a little closer to expiration. 

“One thing we want to make sure we do is obviously take advantage of any relaxation of some of the restrictions but also make sure that we’re still sending in quality and relevant and needed goods,” said Sean Carroll, the president and CEO of the humanitarian organization Anera. He suspects that there will be an even greater reliance on outside aid due to the country’s ongoing political strife and economic tailspin. 

At least 43 Syrian workers were among the victims of the blast, which killed more than 200 people and wounded thousands, and many refugee families who lived along the industrial neighborhoods near the port have seen their homes and savings destroyed. Despite these setbacks, neighboring Palestinian refugee camps have reportedly opened their hospitals to outside cases, and residents within these camps have reportedly come in to help with cleanup.

“Up until now, we don’t know their names and stories. They are victims as much as everyone else,” said Sawssan Abou-Zahr, an independent journalist based in Beirut whose home was destroyed in the blast.

For Abou-Zahr, the blast, caused by explosive chemicals left for years in a portside warehouse, is a punctuation mark to years of government neglect and misrule that have suddenly gone from making daily life unmanageable to making it deadly.

“I despise—and you can quote me on this—I despise every single one among this rotten political system. Every single one,” Abou-Zahr said. “Perhaps COVID-19 will not kill us, but they will kill us.”

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WHY CHINA AND INDIA ARE SPARRING?

Why Are India and China Fighting?

Nuclear powers New Delhi and Beijing engage in a skirmish marking the first combat deaths along their border in more than four decades.

FOREIGN POLICY, BY JAMES PALMER, RAVI AGRAWAL | JUNE 16, 2020, 3:41 PM

 

In a major setback to recent measures to de-escalate tensions, India and China engaged in a deadly skirmish along their border on Monday night. While details of the clash are still emerging, the incident marks the first combat deaths in the area since 1975.

An Indian Army statement acknowledged the death of an officer and two soldiers, with subsequent reports attributed to officials confirming 17 other soldiers succumbed to injuries—reports that Foreign Policy has not independently verified. Both sides confirm that Chinese soldiers were also killed, but the number is unknown. (China is traditionally reluctant to report casualty figures, and it erases some clashes from official history.) Critically, neither side is reported so far to have fired actual weapons; the deaths may have resulted from fistfights and possibly the use of rocks and iron rods. It’s also possible, given the extreme heights involved—the fighting took place in Ladakh, literally “the land of high passes”—that some of those killed died due to falls.

What is the origin of the conflict?

Despite their early friendship in the 1950s, relations between India and China rapidly degenerated over the unresolved state of their Himalayan border. The border lines, largely set by British surveyors, are unclear and heavily disputed—as was the status of Himalayan kingdoms such as Tibet, Sikkim, Bhutan, and Nepal. That led to a short war in 1962, won by China. China also backs Pakistan in its own disputes with India, and China’s Belt and Road Initiative has stirred Indian fears, especially the so-called China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a collection of large infrastructure projects.

The current border is formally accepted by neither side but simply referred to as the Line of Actual Control. In 2017, an attempt by Chinese engineers to build a new road through disputed territory on the Bhutan-India-China border led to a 73-day standoff on the Doklam Plateau, including fistfights between Chinese and Indian soldiers. Following Doklam, both countries built new military infrastructure along the border. India, for example, constructed roads and bridges to improve its connectivity to the Line of Actual Control, dramatically improving its ability to bring in emergency reinforcements in the event of a skirmish. In early May this year, a huge fistfight along the border led to both sides boosting local units, and there have been numerous light skirmishes—with no deaths—since then. Both sides have accused the other of deliberately crossing the border on numerous occasions. Until Monday’s battle, however, diplomacy seemed to be slowly deescalating the crisis: The two sides had opened high-level diplomatic communications and appeared ready to find convenient off-ramps for each side to maintain face. And both countries’ foreign ministers were scheduled for a virtual meeting next week.

Both countries also have a highly jingoistic media—state-run in China’s case, and mostly private in India’s—that can escalate conflicts and drum up a public mood for a fight. Press jingoism, however, can also open strange opportunities for de-escalation: After an aerial dogfight between India and Pakistan in 2019, media on both sides claimed victory of sorts for their respective countries, allowing their leaders to move on.

Compounding the problems is the physically shifting nature of the border, which represents the world’s longest unmarked boundary line; snowfalls, rockslides, and melting can make it literally impossible to say just where the line is, especially as climate change wreaks havoc in the mountains. It’s quite possible for two patrols to both be convinced they’re on their country’s side of the border.

Has there been similar violence in the past?

There have been no deaths—or shots fired—along the border since an Indian patrol was ambushed by a Chinese one in 1975.There have been no deaths—or shots fired—along the border since an Indian patrol was ambushed by a Chinese one in 1975. But China saw significant clashes with both India and the Soviet Union during the late 1960s, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. In India’s case, that culminated in a brief but bloody clash on the Sikkim-Tibet border, with around hundreds of dead and injured on each side. On the Soviet border, fighting along the Ussuri River saw similar numbers of dead, but tensions escalated far higher than with India, leading to fears of a full-blown war and a possible nuclear exchange that were only alleviated by the highest-level diplomacy. In part, those clashes were driven by political needs on the Chinese side; officers and soldiers alike felt the need to demonstrate their Maoist enthusiasm, leading to such actions as swimming across the river waving Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book.

What could happen next?

India has announced that “both sides” are trying to de-escalate the situation, but it has accused China of deliberately violating the border and reneging on agreements made in recent talks between the two sides. China’s response was more demanding, accusing India of “deliberately initiating physical attacks” in a territory—the Galwan Valley in Ladakh that is claimed by both sides—that has “always been ours.” Army officers are meeting to try to resolve the situation.

Why India and China Are Sparring

The two nuclear powers have long had their differences. But the pandemic has led to some frayed nerves—and revealed longer-term ambitions.

While the 2017 Doklam crisis was successfully defused—and was followed by a summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Wuhan, China—recent events could easily spiral out of control. If there are indeed a high number of deaths from Monday’s skirmish, pressure to react and exact revenge may build. The coronavirus has produced heightened political uncertainty in China, leading to a newly aggressive form of “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy—named after a Rambo-esque film that was a blockbuster in China but a flop elsewhere. Chinese officials are under considerable pressure to be performatively nationalist; moderation and restraint are becoming increasingly dangerous for careers.

On the Indian side, there is increasing nervousness about how Beijing has encircled the subcontinent. China counts Pakistan as a key ally; it has growing stakes in Sri Lanka and Nepal, two countries that have drifted away from India in recent years; and it has made huge infrastructure investments in Bangladesh. Meanwhile, much has changed since the last time India and China had deadly clashes in the 1960s and ’70s, when the two countries had similarly sized economies; today, China’s GDP is five times that of India, and it spends four times as much on defense.

There will likely be a business impact following the latest clash. Indians, for example, have recently mobilized to boycott Chinese goods, as evidenced by a recent app “Remove China Apps” that briefly topped downloads on India’s Google Play Store before the Silicon Valley giant stepped in to ban the app.

Heightened tensions also put Indians in China at risk. Although numbers are somewhat reduced due to the coronavirus crisis, there is a substantial business and student community in the country. During the Doklam crisis, the Beijing police lightly monitored and made home visits to Indians in the city.

An escalated crisis doesn’t necessarily mean a full-blown war.An escalated crisis doesn’t necessarily mean a full-blown war. It could mean months of skirmishes and angry exchanges along the border, likely with more accidental deaths. But any one of those could explode into a real exchange of fire between the two militaries. The conditions in the Himalayas themselves severely limit military action; it takes up to two weeks for troops to acclimate to the altitude, logistics and provisioning are extremely limited, and air power is severely restrained. (One worrying possibility for more deaths is helicopter crashes, such as the one that killed a Nepalese minister last year.)

In the event of a serious military conflict, most analysts believe the Chinese military would have the advantage. But unlike China, which hasn’t fought a war since its 1979 invasion of Vietnam, India sees regular fighting with Pakistan and has an arguably more experienced military force.

Is there a permanent solution?

China resolved its border squabbles with Russia and other Soviet successor states in the 1990s and 2000s through a serious diplomatic push on both sides and mass exchanges of territory, and they’ve been essentially a nonissue since then. But although the area involved was much larger, the Himalayan territorial disputes are much more sensitive and harder to resolve.

For one thing, control of the heights along the borders gives a military advantage in future conflicts. Resource issues, especially water, are critical: 1.4 billion people depend on water drawn from Himalayan-fed rivers. And unlike the largely bilateral conflicts along the northern border, multiple parties are involved: Nepal, Bhutan, China, Pakistan, and, of course, India. Add on top of that China’s increasing power and nationalism, matched by jingoism on the Indian side, and the prospects of a long-term solution look small.

James Palmer is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @BeijingPalmer

Ravi Agrawal is the managing editor of Foreign Policy. Twitter: @RaviReports

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TRUMP: WAR AGAINST IRAN?

The Killing of Qassem Suleimani Is Tantamount to an Act of War

By Robin Wright, The New Yorker, 2020, January 3

 

 

On orders from President Trump, the United States killed Major General Qassem Suleimani, the leader of Iran’s élite Quds Force and the mastermind of its military operations across the Middle East, in an overnight air strike at Baghdad’s International Airport. The assassination was the boldest U.S. act in confronting Iran since the 1979 revolution, tantamount to an act of war. A brief statement from the Pentagon described it as a “decisive defensive action” designed to protect U.S. personnel abroad. But the strike represented a stunning escalation between Washington and Tehran, and it may well have the reverse effect. Iran almost certainly will want to respond in some lethal form, whether directly or through its powerful network of proxies in the region. U.S. embassies and military bases—and thousands of American personnel across the Middle East and South Asia, and potentially beyond—were instantly vulnerable. On Friday, the State Department ordered all Americans to leave Iraq.

On Friday, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared three days of public mourning and warned that “harsh vengeance awaits those criminals behind martyrdom of General Suleimani.” He moved quickly to name Brigadier General Esmail Gha’ani, who had worked closely with Suleimani, as the new Quds Force commander. Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s U.S.-educated Foreign Minister, who spent two years negotiating the 2015 nuclear deal with the United States, called the American air strike an act of international terrorism. “The US bears responsibility for all consequences of its rogue adventurism,” he tweeted. Iran’s state-controlled television characterized the assassination as the U.S.’s “biggest miscalculation” since the Second World War. “The people of the region will no longer allow Americans to stay,” it said.

Iran’s revolutionary regime often makes boastful threats, but the murder of Suleimani alarmed veteran U.S. military and diplomatic officials who have served in the Middle East. “It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of this,” the retired general David Petraeus, who led U.S. forces in Iraq and later served as the director of the C.I.A., told me. Suleimani was Petraeus’s nemesis during the eight-year U.S. war in Iraq. “Iran has to be in shock right now. Its version of the National Security Council will be on overdrive,” he said. “But there’s a whole universe of possibilities now, everything from proxy retaliation, kidnappings of American citizens, actions against coalition partners, even an attempt to do something in the U.S. We certainly have large force concentrations in the region, too.”

Was the U.S. attack an act of war? Douglas Silliman, who was the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq until last winter and is now the president of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, told me that the death of Suleimani was the equivalent of Iran killing the commander of U.S. military operations in the Middle East and South Asia. “If Iran had killed the commander of U.S. Central Command, what would we consider it to be?” he said. John Limbert, one of fifty-two Americans who were taken hostage in Iran in 1979, told me that he was happy Suleimani was gone, but quickly added, “This is not going to end well.”

Suleimani, a flamboyant former construction worker and bodybuilder with snowy white hair, a dapper beard, and arching salt-and-pepper eyebrows, gained notice during the eight-year war with Iraq, in the nineteen eighties. He rose through the Revolutionary Guard to become head of the Quds Force—an Iranian unit of commandos comparable to the U.S. seals, Delta Force, and Rangers combined—in 1998. He was the most feared and most admired military leader in the region. He famously rallied followers with flowery jihadi rhetoric about the glories of martyrdom. “The war front is mankind’s lost paradise,” Suleimani was quoted as saying, in 2009. “One type of paradise that is portrayed for mankind is streams, beautiful nymphs and greeneries. But there is another kind of paradise.” The front, he said, was “the lost paradise of the human beings.” Thousands of followers died under his leadership.

Over more than two decades, Suleimani, a Shiite, had more impact than the leaders of either Al Qaeda or isis, which are both Sunni movements, in shaping the face of the Middle East. To counter U.S. influence in Iraq between 2003 and 2011, he provided Iraqi militants with rockets, bombs, and explosively formed projectiles that could slice through the armor of an American M1 tank. “He has the blood of hundreds of Americans on his hands,” Petraeus said. The United States designated the Quds Force as a supporter of terrorism, in 2007, and Suleimani was personally sanctioned for complicity in a plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, in 2011. That same year, he spearheaded a campaign, now in its ninth year, to save President Bashar al-Assad’s regime after civil war erupted in Syria. Suleimani also channelled arms and aid to Hezbollah in Lebanon, orchestrating its franchise operations in other Middle Eastern countries, and aided Houthi rebels in Yemen. He cultivated militia proxies in Pakistan and Afghanistan, thousands of whose members were deployed to fight in Syria. Suleimani gained fame for taking selfies—later posted on social media—on the front lines of regional conflicts where his Quds Force and their allies were deployed. Many went viral.

“I think people in the region saw him as untouchable,” Petraeus said. The only person more powerful in Iran was the Supreme Leader. And, in the Shiite region of the Middle East, there may have been no one more powerful than Suleimani when it came to tangible impact.

“The US just killed Iran’s Patton,” Ian Bremmer, the president of the Eurasia Group, tweeted shortly after the Pentagon issued its statement. Silliman said that Suleimani led a “huge and largely successful strategic advance by Iran through Iraq and Syria and Lebanon.”

After initially operating in the shadows, Suleimani grew rhetorically audacious in the past decade. In 2008, as the U.S. and Iran competed for influence in Iraq, the Iranian general relayed a verbal message to Petraeus through the then Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani, which said, “Dear General Petraeus, you should know that I, Qassem Suleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan.” Suleimani’s point, Petraeus told me, was that the Americans had to deal with him—everywhere.

In 2018, Suleimani famously responded to the warning that Trump issued to the Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani. Trump, after a weekend at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, tweeted, “NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH.” Suleimani belittled Trump. “It is beneath the dignity of our President to respond to you,” he said, in a speech. “We are near you, where you can’t even imagine. We are ready. We are the man of this arena.”When Suleimani was killed, Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago resort, in Palm Beach. Displaying rare restraint, he merely posted an American flag on his Twitter account.

In its statement, the Pentagon charged that Suleimani had, in recent months, orchestrated attacks on bases used by U.S. and allied nations as part of an international coalition fighting isis. He “was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” the Pentagon said.

Suleimani’s death capped a week of hostilities that escalated with lightning speed after a U.S. military contractor was killed in a rocket attack by Kata’ib Hezbollah, one of the most powerful Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, on December 27th. The attack was the group’s eleventh in recent weeks, the U.S. claimed. On December 29th, the Pentagon responded with five air strikes—three in Iraq and two in Syria—on Kata’ib Hezbollah’s bases. The group’s supporters responded by attacking the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, which is the largest and most fortified diplomatic mission in the world.

“General Suleimani also approved the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad that took place this week,” and the attacks on coalition bases in recent months, the Pentagon said, in its statement. It said that the assassination was aimed at deterring future Iranian assaults, noting pointedly, “The United States will continue to take all necessary action to protect our people and our interests wherever they are around the world.”

Kata’ib Hezbollah has been an increasingly important militia since it emerged, under Iranian tutelage, in 2004. After isis swept through Iraq, in 2014, it merged with dozens of other Shiite militias in the Popular Mobilization Forces to fight the Islamic State caliphate—with Iranian aid, arms, and Suleimani’s strategic advice. isis was the one issue on which Iran and the U.S. had common cause. Along with the rest of the P.M.F., Kata’ib Hezbollah was incorporated into the Iraqi military, in 2019, yet it continued to carry out its own operations—in defiance of the government and to the frustration of the United States. The militia has also been deployed in Syria as part of Iran’s support for the Assad regime.

The Pentagon provided no initial details on how the attack played out, but the Iranian media reported that Suleimani had just arrived at the Baghdad airport from Lebanon. The U.S. strike also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the leader of Kata’ib Hezbollah and deputy chief of the P.M.F. He was “by far the most important P.M.F. leader tied to Iran,” Silliman told me. Iranian news agencies said that Suleimani and Muhandis were leaving the airport in separate cars when both were attacked by rockets fired from a U.S. helicopter. The Tasnim news agency, which has been tied to the Revolutionary Guard in the past, tweeted a photo of a bloodied hand wearing a large ring with an oval red stone, which Suleimani was often photographed wearing. The ring was how his body was identified, Iraqi officials said.

The timing was particularly awkward for the Iraqi government, which has long attempted a delicate balancing act between neighboring Iran and the United States. Since October 1st, protests have swept across the country demanding the ouster of the Prime Minister and the entire political class, and an end to corruption and economic inequality. The protests have also been noteworthy because of their unprecedented demonstrations against Iran’s influence in Iraq. In November, protesters set fire to Iranian diplomatic missions in the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.

The U.S. killing of Suleimani and the air strikes on Kata’ib Hezbollah over the weekend are an embarrassment to Iraqi leaders and a challenge to Iraqi sovereignty. They come at a time when Baghdad is gripped by the deepest political crisis since the U.S. invasion ousted Saddam Hussein, in 2003. The Prime Minister, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, a Shiite who spent years in exile in Iran, stepped down and is now playing only a caretaker role. There are already calls for the Iraqi parliament to demand the withdrawal of some five thousand U.S. troops—and hundreds more from more than a dozen coalition neighbors—that are still waging a campaign against isis insurgents. In a tweet, in Arabic, Mahdi called the assassination of Suleimani an act of aggression against the “Iraqi state, its government, and its people.” In an ominous signal to Washington, he said the killing was a “breach of the conditions for the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq.” The Iraqi Parliament is due to debate the U.S. military presence and vote on whether it should continue when it reconvenes, but the Prime Minister has the ultimate say as Commander-in-Chief, Silliman said.

The reaction in Washington played out largely along party lines. Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican of Arkansas and staunch Trump supporter and military veteran, tweeted that Suleimani “got what he richly deserved, and all those American soldiers who died by his hand also got what they deserved: justice.” But top Democrats warned of the fallout—and future cost in American lives. The House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, of California, said that the assassination “risks provoking further dangerous escalation of violence. America—and the world—cannot afford to have tensions escalate to the point of no return.” She and other Democrats charged that Trump attacked a high-level Iranian official without congressional authorization for the use of military force. Tom Udall, a Democrat from New Mexico and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warned, “Such a reckless escalation of hostilities is likely a violation of Congress’s war-making authority—as well as our basing agreement with Iraq—putting U.S. forces and citizens in danger and very possibly sinking us into another disastrous war in the Middle East that the American people are not asking for and do not support.”

Ironically, Suleimani died in just the kind of covert operation that he orchestrated against the United States so often over so many years, with such deadly success. Yet, in his statement on the general’s death, Iran’s supreme leader warned, “His departure to God does not end his path or his mission.”