Very probably he was a bad 'un and deserved a comeuppance, but the point several people are making is that 'him bad guy' does (should) not trump due process. Now that we can't trust western 'democracies' to follow the law and people like yourself are applauding that because the target of the injustice was a bad guy then we truly are fecked.

Indeed. I think a lot of people would consider his Tonyship and Dubya to be war criminals, but if Iran or anyone else were to have them assassinated, then it would be an outrage.

Indeed. I think a lot of people would consider his Tonyship and Dubya to be war criminals, but if Iran or anyone else were to have them assassinated, then it would be an outrage.

"So yes, Soleimani has fueled a lot of nasty conflicts and killed a lot of people, directly or indirectly, many of them American soldiers — though it's worth noting also that much of his recent effort has been dedicated to fighting ISIS (with great effectiveness, by all accounts) in a tacit uneasy alliance with U.S. forces.

Yet even the worst of Soleimani's record pales in comparison with the most blood-drenched American warmongers. If Soleimani deserves condemnation for arming Iraqi insurgents, then George W. Bush and Dick Cheney deserve 10 times as much for starting the war in the first place. It was a pointless, illegal war of aggression sold on lies that obliterated Iraqi society and killed perhaps half a million people, almost all of them innocent civilians. (Our own Soleimani, General David Petraeus, was connected to the operation of Iraqi torture dungeons and paramilitary death squads during the fight against the insurgency.)

If Soleimani deserves blame for helping Bashar al-Assad brutally defeat Syrian rebels, Henry Kissinger deserves 10 times as much for orchestrating the bombing slaughter of perhaps a quarter million Cambodians and paving the way for the Khmer Rouge genocide that killed 1.7 million people.

If any accused war criminal at an airport is fair game, then there are a lot of people in D.C. and Northern Virginia who better start traveling by train or ship.

Indeed, the Quds Force itself was originally created during the Iran-Iraq War, which was started by a heavily U.S.-backed Saddam Hussein in 1980. A million Iranians died in the grueling eight-year conflict. And the reason the Islamic Republic exists in the first place is because the United States and Britain toppled Iran's fledgling democracy in 1953 and installed a brutal dictator.

It is not exactly hard to understand why Iran — like about every other country in the Middle East — keeps some brutal, hard people like Soleimani around. It's a violent, unstable neighborhood, and war is an unavoidable reality. And no country is more responsible for that fact than the United States."

I agree but I think the point he made is valid, despite the incorrect terminology. We shouldn't allow the choice of word to invalidate his otherwise good point.

Indeed. I think a lot of people would consider his Tonyship and Dubya to be war criminals, but if Iran or anyone else were to have them assassinated, then it would be an outrage.

I think you might accidentally be invoking Stalin here when you try to differentiate between terrorists and war criminals.

You view killing handfuls of people, as terrorists are wont to do as a tragedy whereas killing millions, as war criminals tend to, as a statistic.

Also, do you have any evidence for Soleimani being on EU and UN terrorist watchlists? I can find no evidence for this aside from Trump claiming it to be so.

Collateral damage is fine when it aligns with our aims, but not when it aligns with Iran's aims, is that really your takeaway here?

And yet he still killed only a tiny fraction of Bush and Blair's numbers.

What did our intrepid duo think would happen during aerial bombardments, with millions of tons of ordnance being fired into the country? Unicorns and daisies I suppose.

Collateral damage is fine when it aligns with our aims, but not when it aligns with Iran's aims, is that really your takeaway here?