For the better part of a decade, America’s main base of operations for its military occupation of Iraq was a cluster of bases and old Saddam Hussein–era palaces surrounding Baghdad International Airport. It was from here, around BIAP, that American and allied generals promulgated orders to their tens of thousands of field troops, and U.S. operators trained Iraq’s budding special operations forces. This is also where, in the early weeks of the 2003 invasion, Sgt. 1st Class Paul Smith became one of the first American combat deaths of the Iraq War; he was killed manning a machine gun against an Iraqi position while his comrades beat a hasty retreat, an action for which President George W. Bush would later present a Medal of Honor to Smith’s 11-year-old son on his old man’s behalf. When later American soldiers stationed on the Victory Base Complex around BIAP worked out, many of them did so at the Paul R. Smith gym. If the tragic, misshapen American adventure in Iraq were a body, its irregularly beating heart was Baghdad International Airport.

Surely it means something that, in order to telegraph his strength to the rest of the world on the second day of the year 2020, President Trump bombed America’s former supreme military base in Iraq, without offering the world any comment, other than to tweet a low-resolution image of an American flag. Surely, what this means is that meaning is dead.

The apparent target of Trump’s ire was Iranian major general and bona fide “bad dude” Qassem Soleimani—a longtime confidant of the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, the organizer of covert military action across the Middle East, and a main architect of Iranian foreign policy. It’s hard to describe Soleimani and his importance in brief: I recommend that everyone read Dexter Filkins’s masterful 2013 New Yorker profile to get a full flavor of the man who, among other things, brilliantly and ruthlessly exacted a human toll from U.S. fighting forces in Iraq and helped engineer the predictable quagmire there. It is accurate, in some sense, to say Soleimani was in a very small global elite class with Trump himself: bloody-handed fanatics, empowered by devoted followings, whose elite status in their home nations rendered them immune from the sorts of assassinations they doled out with zeal. But, of course, Soleimani and Trump are very different. Trump is stupider, and Soleimani is deader.

Both of those facts are important today. For the past week, Iran–likely through Soleimani’s militia contacts in Iraq–had played on Trump’s stupidity and vanity with a classic strategy torn from the insurgent handbook: exploit popular unrest and hatred of an occupying power to provoke that power into a violent overreaction.

The United States, having withdrawn its forces from Iraq in 2011 under an agreement negotiated by Bush, still maintains the largest embassy complex in human history in Baghdad’s old “Green Zone,” which regularly becomes a focus of popular dissension in Iraq. The people of Iraq have had much to protest: Their post-Saddam government has been shot through with corruption and sectarianism while proving utterly inept at security operations and the provision of basic public services. In 2012, Sunni protests against the government’s Shia orientation aided the rise of the Islamic State; in 2016, Shia groups led by Muqtada al-Sadr protested the government’s inability to protect their religious pilgrims. Last year’s unrest started in September, when educated Iraqis took to the streets to protest unemployment and government impotence. Eager to prove its potency, the Iraqi government quashed the demonstrations violently; by October, national protests were underway, and the government was escalating with internet shutdowns and street curfews.