When President Trump, in his first term, killed Qasem Soleimani, a member of the administration of the Iranian state, he was indignant when the killing was described as an “assassination”.  But he did not say what the right name for it was.  And we do not recall that any of the Governments in “the rules based order” of the world commented on the event one way or another.

Assassination is a form of murder.  It was the name given to the murder of important people, usually done by people whose only importance was that they did it for a public motive rather than out of personal hatred.

US President Abraham Lincoln was famously assassinated in 1865 by John Wilkes Booth when he went to the theatre for relaxation following his suppression of the Confederate States in a War costing a million lives.  The Crown Prince of Austria was assassinated at Sarajevo because he was thought to have a reasonable chance of reconciling some of the Slav peoples to life within the multi-national Hapsburg Empire.  The fall-out from that assassination was manipulated by Britain into the First World War—in which an estimated 20 million were killed.

Many Kings, Lords, Emperors, Presidents, Ministers, Governors and Landlords have been assassinated without it ever being suggested that they were not murdered.  Assassination has been understood as a kind of murder raised out of the commonplace, an act which might be judged good or bad according to more general standards.

In the documentaries on inter-War Germany it is broadly hinted that it would have been a good thing if Hitler had been murdered early on—though, if he had been, we could not know that it was a good thing.

Lenin was almost murdered by Fanny Kaplan on behalf of the Socialist Revolutionaries because he made the Brest Litovsk Treaty with Germany, against the will of his own party, pulling Russia out of the Great War—instead of proclaiming revolutionary war in Europe and committing his recently established State and Army to it.  Was that assassination attempt good or bad?  Would it have been good if it had succeeded?  Was it bad because it failed?

The attempt left Lenin more strong-willed and purposeful than ever but with only the strength to carry on for a few years.  In those few years he consolidated a regime of state, and gave it a sense of orientation amidst all the problems—domestic and foreign—in which it might have sunk, and enabled it to be functional without him.

Assassination is high-quality murder.  It is murder, in that it is not committed within any system of law, and therefore, regardless of its consequences, it remains murder—unless we go over to the Alice In Wonderland language in which words cease to have objective meaning.

There was a time when “Killing no murder” was a slogan attributed to Catholics as a principle by Protestants of the “Glorious Revolution” and the Ascendancy.

The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 announced a new era in the history of the world:  an era in which it would be made manifest that Protestantism was the authentic expression of human nature as the Creator made it—or at least intended it to be.

Catholics were subject to this Revolution but were at the same time excluded from it.  They were outside its law, which was awkward, seeing that they constituted most of the population of Ireland under the Crown.

The Constitution of the Glorious Revolution dealt with this anomaly by presuming that it did not exist!  The Crown could have no Catholic subjects, therefore it had no subjects who were Catholic.  There was a Kingdom of Ireland, an Irish Parliament, and an Irish Bar, but there wasn’t a Catholic to be found in any of them!  An Irish gentleman was an Anglo-Irish member of the Church of Ireland.

Peter Walsh asked what advantage there was in being oppressed by law.  No answer was given.

The Irish were outlawed by the law.  By comprehensive interaction they were Catholic, and therefore their existence was a breach of the law.  Some informal accommodations were made with some of them here and there, but they were excluded from all the institutions that made up official existence.

They did not exist within the law and the idea of murder presumes existence within the law.  The function of the State with relation to them was to make them obedient to it, as if they were a herd of animals—which seemed to be how Lord Fitzgibbon regarded them right up to the moment of the Act Of Union—and even later.  

But, since they were humans being treated as animals, and knew they were, and had some memory of where they came from, and retained extensive connections with European culture (which still had meaningful existence in those times), it seems possible that the doctrine that unauthorised killing was not necessarily murder was established for the situation in which they were placed.

But how could such a thing conceivably be the case with regard to acts of killing carried out by the President of the United States beyond the Borders of the USA?

If there is a rules-based order in the world, where is the authority that keeps it in order, and that declares when a State does something in breach of it?

There is no such authority.  The United Nations is not it—and was not meant to be.  The Veto System built into the Security Council at the start means that the Veto Powers could not be named as being in breach of the International Law which was presumed to exist—and these were the Powers most like to act in breach of it.

The General Assembly may pass what motions it pleases, but it has no power to do anything further about it.  And, when the Assembly declared support for the finding of the International Court Of Justice that Israel had a case to answer over Genocide in Gaza, the Israeli Ambassador—facing the General Assembly—declared it to be an Anti-Semitic conspiracy, and tore up the UN Charter as having nothing to do with the reality of world affairs.

If a world order was established by either the League Of Nations in 1919 or the United Nations in 1945, recognition of national sovereignty would have been basic to it.

A great variety of nations of different kinds existed in the world before the League of Nations or the United Nations were dreamt of.  And what both the League and the UN did, while establishing the nation-state as the official norm for the world, was set in motion of process of erosion of the actual national diversity that existed.

Sovereignty was established as an ideal, subject to the condition of Universal Human Rights.  And that condition, as developed by the avant garde financed capitalist states, has been used as a means of eroding national diversity.  Nations can no longer be allowed to be substantially different from one another.

Ireland has been busily remaking itself, according to the identikit formula, for forty years.  It remained silent when the US threatened to exterminate Iran and wipe out all traces of Persian civilisation because the form of the Iranian nation-state is that of a Muslim Theocracy—and Irish opinion-formers of recent times imagine that the Irish State was a Catholic Theocracy, from which they have heroically freed it!

Nationalist Ireland was a Catholic society.  It was so by choice.  The Church had no purchase power over it.  The State had to legislate on Catholic lines in certain matters because of electoral opinion.  But many Governments resisted electoral opinion as far as they could, and the Catholic Church was never the Established Church in Ireland, as the Anglican Church was under the Irish Ascendancy Parliament, and as the Church of England is in England and the Presbyterian Church is in Scotland.  

But Presidents Robinson and McAleese set in motion the illusion that Nationalist Ireland was a Roman Catholic theocracy from which it needed to be released.

Even Provisional Sinn Fein bought into that idea in the South.  It revolted against all that Irish society had made of itself, and it became the radical vanguard of de-nationalising finance-capital reform, once it felt itself at a loose end after achieving the 1998 reform which made Northern Ireland functional within the British state.  It even appealed to Westminster to use its sovereign authority to impose abortion liberalisation which the local Government was resisting.

Provisional Sinn Fein appears to have become what Official Sinn Fein aspired to be in the 1970s.  It has dedicated itself to realising the identikit nation of Finance Capitalism.

President Clinton, for his own reasons, obliged the British Government to make terms with Sinn Fein in 1998, and it is repaying the debt.

Meanwhile the President kidnaps the President of Venezuela, and charges him with supplying the insatiable US demand for drugs, and he takes over the Venezuela regime under what used to be called a Puppet Government and, by that means, takes over Venezuelan oil!

And there is little or no protest against the kidnapping of a head of state by the leader of the free world.  The right to do such a thing was established by precedent a generation ago, when the President of Panama was kidnapped, tried and sentenced in the USA.

The compliance of the Venezuelan regime, minus the President, was gained by the threat of what would happen to them if they did not comply.

There were no threats made against the Iranian regime.  It was invited to submit an unconditional surrender, and then, without further ado, the top layer of the theocracy was assassinated by precision bombing, implemented by the US and Israel active in alliance.

Then a second layer of leadership was assassinated.

These were targeted killings, of known individuals, and there was no protest when they were described as assassinations.

The President then, by his own account, killed a part of the third layer of Iranian leadership—and apparently expected what remained of the regime to offer to make a deal with him, as the Venezuelan regime had done.

It seems that the leader of the Jewish State—who imagined he was well informed about Iran because there is a Jewish population in Iran which has representation within the system—advised the President that he could take over the system as a means of destroying it.

But the Iranian regime, with two layers of its leadership assassinated, did not run for cover.  It behaved as if nothing had happened to it.  And it fought back to the best of its ability.

The British Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, was pressed to give an opinion on what was being done to Iran by Britain’s two closest allies.

She said that the United States considered it to be in its national interest to do what it was doing to Iran.  That is all she said on the matter!

She also said that it was not in the British national interest to participate, with the US and Israel, in the direct assault on Iran.  But, since Iran “escalated” the conflict by retaliating to the attack on it, Britain would retaliate against the Iranian retaliation against American bases in the Gulf States which Britain considered to be within its sphere of interest.

So that is the rules-based order today!  Killing which is unauthorised by law is not murder when it is done in the national interest.

That has long been the plainly-stated Israeli position.  It has said that it will kill people it considers a danger to its national interest, wherever they may exist, regardless of local sovereignty—and it has done so with impunity.

Now that is quite openly the position of the United States.  And the British Foreign Secretary judges it to be in the British national interest not to disagree.

Brendan Clifford

Editorial Note:  

Qasem Soleimani was killed on 3rd January 2020.  More than a dozen high-ranking Iranian clerics have been assassinated in recent times.  In addition there has been indiscriminate bombings of civilians.  Ed.