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.”[1]
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.”[2]
His own forecast was short: “there’s going to be retaliation … everybody’s talking about de-escalation. De-escalation is a pipe dream.”[1][2]
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.”[1]
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.[3][1]
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.”[4][5]