Island
By Jolly Somasundram
“God invented war to teach geography to Americans.” – Mark Twain
On the second day of the second decade of the 21st century (2nd of January 2020), there was an assassination, the infamy of which will reverberate down the ages. An assassination is a targeted taking out of an individual to serve political purposes. There are two grades of assassination, the garden variety and an uber one. The January event was uber, like the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in 1915 sparking WW1. The uber assassination of Qassem Soleimani- the number two in Iran- could have similar ricocheting effects. Talking heads and writing wrists are predicting mayhem. But, except for a token face-saving response by Iran, so far, there has been an eerie silence.
Unease lies on the head of the individual, now facing trial in the Senate, after impeachment by the House of Representatives. One sure countervailing quick-fix solution for him to regain political traction, was ‘La Gloire’, a declaration of war on someone- whether internal or external, with reason or without reason- to reap a patriotic dividend. Americans are past masters of this subterfuge. In her entire history she had only 10 years where she was not at war. Beleaguered Trump, in search of Gloire, personally ordered the assassination of Qassem Soleimani. A President of the US is entitled to declare war on a country with Congressional approval, not order assassinations, like a mafia mobster. Trump could only offer shifty explanations for his assassination decision. “There was no doubt that there were a series of imminent attacks being plotted by Soleimani. We don’t know precisely when, we don’t know precisely where, but we know it was real,” he asserted. He elaborated, “I think it would have been four embassies, could have been military bases, could have been other things too. But it was imminent.” When asked about the timeline of ‘imminence’ Gen Mark A Miller, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, “days, weeks months.” This monstrous assassination, based on an oneiric surmise, ‘was most foul, strange and unnatural,’ as the Ghost said in Hamlet. It was the equivalent of a hostile power assassinating a serving US Vice-President. The assassination of Soleimani had also a collateral advantage for Trump: it would give him a boost in polls, at the forthcoming presidential elections.
American Presidents are not all that renowned for speaking the truth, the exception being George Washington. Their oath of office seems to be to ‘tell the untruth, the whole untruth and nothing but the untruth.’ President Lyndon Johnson cooked up a non-existent naval incident in Tonkin, Vietnam, and ratcheted it to be the cause for the Vietnam war, in which three million Vietnamese died. President George Bush cooked up a fantasy, non-existent weapons of mass destruction fiction, that led to the Iraq war, which is continuing, with 1.5 million Iraqi’s dead so far. All those involved in the Iraqi folly-George Bush, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Colin Powell are yet living, enjoying the profits of that war. The Iraq war metatasised, spreading under the barbaric ISIS, which advance has since gone into remission. The Iraq war has spread to Afghanistan where it continues. The assassination of Soleimani could only be the prelude to declaring war on Iran.
The US was not at war with Iran at the time of the assassination but, with total impunity, she waylaid Soleimani on his return to his home country of Iran. He was returning from a peace mission to Syria by commercial flight. He landed at Bagdad International Airport (Iraq) and rode in his car to Teheran (Iran). En route, the US Air Force downed him through a drone attack, conducted in Iraqi air space and on Iraqi sovereign territory, instantly killing Soleimani and three other high-ranking Iraqi officers. Trump went over the top with joy, claiming that he had rendered American justice to Soleimani. Civilized societies consider an accused to be innocent till he is proved guilty: Trump’s thinking was more basic, he considered an accused be guilty purely because the mob considered him to be so. Trump wanted to continue the carnage after the Soleimani assassination by threatening Iran that if she dared retaliate, he had ear-marked 52 cultural Iranian sites of irreplaceable value for destruction. Like the Goths and the Vandals, who razed Rome to rubble, Trump wanted to do the same to Iranian historical artifacts accumulated over 2,500 years. This barbaric thought, may be because he may not be too well aware of what culture was or even what history is. He could not savour either, for, the culture and history of the US was only 250 years old. Trump may have thought that culture was merely the glitz, kitsch and tinsel of a Las Vegas.
America, a macho society, where owning guns is a constitutional right, murder- where the gun is the weapon of choice- is savoured with relish like apple pie. There are about 50,000 gun deaths per year. Tariffs, sanctions (individual, institutional and national) and assassination of uber foreign dignitaries are part of American foreign policy options, Soleimani being the most recent hit. Lumumba of the Congo was a victim of assassination as was Kassem of Iraq before Saddam Hussein and Allende of Chile. Numerous unsuccessful attempts were made on Fidel Castro’s life. Assassinating Soleimani was par for the foreign policy course. A special institution specialises in planning these assassinations, getting them carried out and providing cover-ups. This institution is colloquially called the CIA (the Centre for Institutionalised Assassinations). To say Americans have a concern for human rights would be the equivalent of the claim that Dracula had a commitment to Blood Banks.
Over time, especially in the post-WWW II period, an effort was made to bring system, order and rule for managing conflict between countries. Among these were the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Nuremburg principles, rules of international law. Impunity was decried, a high place was given to the rule of law and due process. Soleimani’s assassination upended all these principles. When this issue was taken up with Boris Johnson, as the just appointed British Prime Minister, he said, “I cannot comment on the legality of the act (the assassination) but most responsible people have justified it.” To Boris Johnson, what matters, is not the rule of law and due process, but lynch action based on the decisions of the People. London is the capital for international civil society organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. They regularly lecture the developing world on avoiding impunity and meticulously following the rule of international and local law and due process. The most egregious violation of these sacred principles was the assassination of Soleimani. Not a word was heard from these civil society organisations. It will be apposite for them to be reminded of what hypocrisy means. “It is a pretence to have virtues and moral principles which are not actually possessed, specially among those whose actual behavior belie stated claims.”
It would not go amiss, if local political civil society organisations mull on hypocrisy, the linkages these organisations have with their international handlers and try, to re-set their relationships to also benefit Sri Lanka. The election results of the 2019 national election could be a wake-up call about their relevance. Less than 0.01% of the poll of 15 million voters (80% turnout) voted for civil society organisations.
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