Qasem Soleimani
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Qasem Soleimani was the Iranian general killed by an American drone strike at an airstrip in Baghdad in January 2020. John Kiriakou discussed the killing less than twenty-four hours after it happened.

What was destroyed

His assessment of the target's standing was high: "Donald Trump killing arguably the second most important person in Iran, a potential successor to the supreme leader."

He relayed an exchange he had seen reported, in which an Iranian journalist asked officials whether the strike was equivalent to killing Petraeus or Mattis. "The response was: no, this is far worse than killing Petraeus or Mattis. This is like killing Pence."

His own forecast was short: "there's going to be retaliation ... everybody's talking about de-escalation. De-escalation is a pipe dream."

The programme that produced it

Kiriakou treats the strike as the predictable end point of a policy rather than a departure. "It's not legal to send drones to other countries and to just rocket people without due process, without the right to confront their accusers in a court of law before a jury of their peers. Whether we like their politics or not is irrelevant."

He assigns responsibility across administrations: "Barack Obama got away with it for so long, the inevitable continuation was going to be Donald Trump getting away with it." And he credits the drone whistleblowers, naming Daniel Hale, rendered "David Hale" in the auto-captions, with having warned that exactly this would happen.

The official explanation

Kiriakou singled out Mike Pompeo's appearance on Fox & Friends that morning, in which the Secretary of State said the strike had been made in order to help de-escalation and had saved untold numbers of Muslim lives. "We're in Orwellian craziness right now." What struck him as much as the claim was the reception: "all the nattering nabobs on Fox just nodded their heads over and over, like that made total sense."

See also

- Mike Pompeo
- Daniel Hale
- The Drone Papers
- Barack Obama
