This is a good piece by Ryan Crocker, a long-time State Department hand and expert on the Middle East.  He's a serious guy, who represented the United States for both Republican and Democratic Presidents.  He offers a sober assessment of Suleimani's killing.  He talks about it in terms of "escalation dominance," the worry that we have entered into a tit-for-tat exchange practice with Iran without necessarily thinking through where all this ends.

I am pointing this out because I notice a lot of expressions of horror at the current administration's actions, and a radical disavowal of them.  But horror is easy.  And expressions of disavowal are easy, too.  I'm reminded of the famous exchange between JFK and Air Force General Curtis LeMay during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  LeMay said: "You're in a pretty bad fix, Mr. President."  JFK replied: "Well maybe you haven't noticed, but you're in it with me."  

Too many people right now are acting like LeMay, as if they are simply disinterested spectators in this horror show.  They're not; we're not; you're not.  You may not have noticed, but you're in it with him.  And the odds of you suffering, more than Trump, are not negligible.  You should think about this, and figure out what you think of what we should do, more than simply pooh-poohing the administration.  This is an opportunity for all of us to think about a better course of action than the one they're likely to undertake--in the chance, however small you think it is (I think it is large), that enough of American power and standing survives this incident to be operative in the future.

Crocker has some thoughts about this, especially in helping us see the dimensions of the situation:

“In the complex context of Iran, this becomes multidimensional chess. We have forces in Iraq and Syria, as well as a military presence throughout the Gulf: in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman. These are assets, but they are also potential targets, as are the countries where they are located. We will also have to consult very closely with Israel.

Escalation dominance is not a simple measure of raw power. It is about which party is more likely to dominate in a given context, something that is a function of abilities but also determination, prioritization and patience.”

So let's think.  The core act, the killing of Suleimani, is both an ethical and a geopolitical fact. It can be assessed in both idioms.  Ethical assessments are important, but let me postpone that for a minute and think about the geopolitical features in play here.

Politically, this seems likely to harm opponents of the Iranian regime in Iran, as it will consolidate support behind the regime among the populace. In Iraq, a similar consolidation seems to be happening in the Shi'a population. Note that the Kurds and the Sunnis are not so enthusiastic in their lamentations.

In Lebanon, and secretly in Syria, a similar dynamic will be playing out. Much of the Middle East will see this in the prism of a Sunni vs. Shi'a sectarian fight. 

Europe, Japan, and South Korea are already freaked out by Trump, and this won't help.  We certainly didn't coordinate with the Europeans on this, and while I suspect more than a few people in the continent are happy with Suleimani's death, it creates all sorts of headaches for them, and they will not be eager to ally with the US in figuring out what to do next.  China and Russia will be really concerned, though for different reasons: the Russians just lost a major ally, and China has suddenly discovered that its energy supplies are protected in part by a guy who doesn't really think things through.

The Iranian options for retaliation are perhaps more complicated, and less attractive, the many people in the United States realize. First of all, the argument that they could close the Straits of Hormuz--this would be a major escalation, and not actually hurt the United States directly very much. Most Gulf oil doesn’t go to the US anymore; it goes centrally to China, also Japan and Korea, and Europe. Ever since the fracking boom, Persian Gulf oil has become less and less important to America. Plus, the Iranians want to sell more oil, not stop the selling of oil.  In an earlier post, I mentioned this fact and how it may lead to a regional realignment for the United States, with a long-term tendency to re-align with Iran and away from Saudi Arabia.  Such a realignment seems far away now, but the underlying conditions driving it haven't changed, and in this case they actually gave the US more freedom than it used to have to harm Iran, rather than make nice with the regime.

There are three other kinds of disruption that the Iranians might undertake. First, they might attack US forces elsewhere in the Middle East. Second, they might attack US assets or US citizens elsewhere in the world. Third, they might like some kind of cyberattack.  There's no need for them to choose one over the others; they could do all of them, on different timescales.  Already it looks like they are going to press hard on getting the US out of Iraq.  I wonder if that will happen; Trump's truculent response so far doesn't seem to be an effective counterweight to Iranian pressure.  I guess we'll see.

On the ethical legitimacy of killing Suleimani?  To be honest, on this one I am of two minds.  This was a bad guy, a really bad guy, doing a lot of bad around the region and beyond.  In itself, considered entirely out of context, intentionally killing him seems a large step.  But honestly, I'd rather have more generals killed than privates.

On the other hand, were we to take this step without thinking through all the consequences of killing a major figure in a foreign government--and I think this is just what we did--you don't even have to go to ethics to say this is bad: whatever you think of the ethics of it, such an act, done in haste, and carelessly, is profoundly stupid.  And stupidity is most definitely a mortal sin for a political leader.

I'll update this as time goes on.