Another Wall Street Journal article about Iran's most important dead asshole.

OPINION

COMMENTARY

Wall Street Journal - The Bloody Legacy of Qasem Soleimani

The supreme leader will certainly seek revenge. But achieving that end may prove challenging.

By Reuel Marc Gerecht

January 3, 2020

We should recognize the accomplishments even of wicked men. Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani rose from a family of landless peasants in Iran’s Kerman province. He enlisted in 1979 in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the theocracy’s paramilitary vanguard, and fought against Kurdish insurrectionists, Saddam Hussein’s legions, and drug-running Baluchis who refused to allow the IRGC a monopoly on Afghan opium.

Unlike many of the Islamic Republic’s founders, Soleimani didn’t avoid danger. He didn’t casually send his men in waves to die for Allah; he went with them, gathering determined, accomplished holy warriors who sought victory, not martyrdom.

IRGC veterans of the Iran–Iraq war generally come in two types: burned-out shells and those who still burned for the revolution. Soleimani was emphatically in the latter category. He and his patron, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, fulfilled one of the revolution’s repeatedly frustrated aspirations: to create effective versions of the Lebanese Hezbollah, the first and favorite Arab child of the Islamic revolution, throughout the Middle East.

Today, under the guidance and training of the Quds Force, the IRGC’s expeditionary special-forces branch, there are Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani variations of Hezbollah, which have become foot soldiers for Iranian imperialism. Even in Yemen, among the Zaidi Shiites, whom Iranian Shiites have traditionally viewed with condescension, the Quds Force has helped instill a radical anti-American ethic.

Not since the early Ottoman Empire has the world seen such a variegated collection of Muslims, tens of thousands, come together to fight under the flag and direction of a foreign Muslim power. It’s particularly impressive given the travails of the clerical regime inside Iran, where the revolutionary ethos has collapsed among wide swaths of the population.

Expansionism has come at a cost: The regime’s earlier, more-ecumenical vision of a global Islamic revolt—which played down Iran’s Shiism in the hope of enlisting Sunnis in the revolutionary cause—has perished. Soleimani and Mr. Khamenei are as responsible as Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Syrians and the displacement of millions. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this foreign adventure to Tehran’s self-esteem and its adjusted “civilizing mission,” which Mr. Khamenei has always seen as his sustaining purpose. Soleimani became a cult figure among Shiite holy warriors—in his heavily accented, halting Arabic, he exuded a menacing charisma—and even among more secularized Iranians who saw in him an Iranian paladin who made Sunni Arabs tremble.

But that allure was fading. The internal and foreign crimes of Iran’s Islamist regime loom large and in plain sight. With the possible exception of the Intelligence Ministry, the security apparatus of the theocracy operates under the supervision of the IRGC. The worst thugs may be the Basij, the regime’s Brownshirts. But they take their orders from senior IRGC commanders.

The coldblooded killing of hundreds of antiregime demonstrators—young men and, more shocking to Iranians, women—in 2019 was the work of the IRGC and the members of the Supreme National Security Council. It was Revolutionary Guard commanders who gathered in August 2009, after the pro-democracy Green Movement had been put down with mass arrests, rape and murder, to review which tactics worked best against counterrevolutionary dissent. In 2017 against provincial demonstrations and this winter, when countrywide anger erupted over a reduction in gasoline subsidies, they put those discussions into action.

In a country fed up with religious dictatorship, it’s not surprising that discussions about Soleimani’s becoming president died before an American missile killed him.

In Iraq, the earliest protests among Shiite politicians against Soleimani’s heavy-handedness were in 2004; anger at Iranian meddling and religious arrogance has been growing ever since. It’s not surprising to see some Iraqis celebrate his death, or the more fearful quietly express relief.

Now Soleimani has become a martyr in the Islamic revolution’s 41-year battle against the U.S. The men he trained and advanced will carry on. But the supreme leader may be less bold, at least for a while. Mr. Khamenei’s close relationship with Soleimani probably revolved around the man-of-action fortifying the cleric’s more ambitious inclinations. It’s an excellent bet that Tehran’s most daring maneuvers—the foiled bombing of Iranian dissidents in Paris in June 2018, which could have killed hundreds; the attacks on shipping in the Persian Gulf and the Saudi oil facilities last year; and the repeated recent attacks on American bases in Iraq, which killed and wounded Americans—all had Soleimani’s fingerprints. He understood well the new Middle East, where weak nation-states leave citizens gravitating toward religion, sect and tribe. Soleimani had a well-honed sense for the jugular. He understood tribal politics.

Younger Revolutionary Guards certainly don’t appear as talented as the founding generation. Even Soleimani, who had little experience beyond war and the machinations of clerics, could authorize abroad crude, easily thwarted, and counterproductive operations. The Islamic Republic’s senior bench isn’t deep.

The supreme leader will certainly seek revenge for his favorite’s death. But achieving that end against the U.S. may prove challenging—provided the cleric and IRGC commanders believe President Trump will pummel them. Booting America from Iraq via the Iraqi Parliament may not be so easy because even Iran’s Iraqi allies often don’t care for Persian diktats.

It is fitting that the U.S. took down Soleimani. Like many of his fellow Guardsmen, he regularly mocked Washington’s staying power, not concealing his delight about the American blood spilled in Mesopotamia. In 2011, when President Obama withdrew U.S. forces from Iraq, the general surely thought he’d won the lottery given the defeat Iranian-aided forces had suffered during George W. Bush’s “surge.” It’s a biting, and enjoyable, irony that Mr. Trump, who has criticized “endless wars” in the Middle East, ended the general’s pretensions.

Mr. Gerecht is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and author, as Edward Shirley, of “Know Thine Enemy: A Spy’s Journey into Revolutionary Iran” (1997).