Donald Trump is a bad man, presiding over the deaths of thousands of civilians in Iraq and Syria with a fast-tracked War on Terror that obliterated much of Mosul and Raqqa. Another bad man, who at times was a de facto ally in the U.S.-led campaign against ISIS, was Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian general who Trump assassinated via Reaper drone outside the Baghdad airport.

By acknowledging that they’re both bad men — that a man who bombed a mosque killed a man who starved a village — are we lending support to an impulsive and extrajudicial killing? Does citing Soleimani’s sins enlist us as co-signers of the drone strike?

This goes beyond Soleimani’s killing. For some, acknowledging Soleimani’s track record represents a mushy liberal concession to those who would like a full-on war between the U.S. and Iran. The idea is that by being clear-eyed about Soleimani’s record, we are providing supplementary justification for war. It may be true that Soleimani was bad, but that fact complicates the anti-war argument; on the other hand, if evil doesn’t exist, there’s no need for intervention.

The problem is that it does exist, this evil abroad. And the argument that acknowledging it paves the way to war reflects a lack of confidence and a flimsy premise.

The U.S. did not, for example, invade Iraq in 2003 because the anti-war left acknowledged that Saddam Hussein was an evil man (whose crimes against his people, and Iran, enjoyed U.S. support). The vast majority of anti-war activists never fathomed a defense of the Iraqi dictator. Questioning the Bush administration’s assertions about weapons of mass destruction wasn’t crankery, but based on the active, on-the-ground work of the United Nations. But a minority of anti-war activists went much further, denying that a one-time ally of the U.S. had ever used chemical weapons against his own people. Ex-Labour MP George Galloway was on Hussein’s payroll as he defended the Iraqi regime.

Today, this disreputable fringe busies itself searching for typos in U.N. reports on the Syrian regime’s own, well-documented use of chemical weapons — both sarin and chlorine gas — effectively condoning a war waged by Syria, Russia, and Iran in the name of stopping what they say is a Western regime-change war (that nobody in a Western capital even wants).

At best, this brand of anti-war politics is a tactical error. The most basic of nuance — that bad men kill bad men, and that there are no good guys among war criminals — is viewed as the born-to-lose liberal’s concession to the logic of empire. Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders admitting this truth is held up as a sign of weakness, if not imperialism, as though these social democrats lack the courage and advanced political clarity of a dirtbag radical in a Hezbollah t-shirt purchased on Amazon.com.

But political death lies in denying the indisputable. Soleimani was, indeed, a bad man, one who orchestrated the starvation of Madaya, a rebel-held town in Syria. He recruited teenage refugees to wage war in countries that neither he nor they came from.

“The majority of people in Afghanistan knew Qasem Soleimani as a murderer of their children,” Abdul Qader Kamil, an Afghan political analyst, told one reporter.

In Iraq, Soleimani organized Iranian proxy militias that fought the Islamic State but also engaged in indiscriminate violence against civilians, carrying out “war crimes, revenge attacks, and other atrocities” with the help of weapons provided by the U.S. (and Europe, and Russia, and even Iran), according to Amnesty International.

Highlighting U.S. complicity is one way to critique an enemy in a manner that does not absolve a superpower that only seems to care when the victims are American.

Some, however, prefer the anti-imperialism of denial.

A presenter at AJ+, the social media-oriented Qatari news service, argued that the right thing to do is to keep one’s mouth shut. To acknowledge the nature of the Iranian regime is to fail to oppose the Trump administration’s myopic imperialism, since it means “qualifying” that opposition. Anyone who concedes that the Iranian government includes malevolent actors “actually provides a justification, through agreement, for those actions.”

But that is only true, again, if the existence of evil compels U.S. military action. It doesn’t.

What really fuels militarism is the refusal to admit the truth. Unless one denies that Iran is, like other military powers, up to no good, keeping mum about the reality of Iranian evil makes the opponents of war into a caricature of themselves. That’s just what powerful warmongers want them to be. Reverse exceptionalism — the idea that the United States is the only bad actor worth identifying — is no more sophisticated than “my country, right or wrong.”

Anti-war protestors march from the White House to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, on January 4, 2020. | Credit: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds (Getty)

Some say hawks will do their thing anyway. They’ll call anyone to the left of the GOP an appeaser of terror. And indeed they will, as former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley has already done. The best way to help rebut this absurd lie, though, is to make sure it stays absurd and a lie. Covering for Iran’s international campaign of terror sponsorship does the opposite.

There is always room to question the narratives of the powerful. Trump is a serial liar and a war criminal in his own right. Indeed, Trump and Soleimani recently worked in de facto concert, since Iranian-backed militias under Soleimani’s direction participated in the U.S.-led war on ISIS. But there is no evidence Soleimani was up to anything in January 2020 that he was not up to in December 2019. Public evidence suggests, rather, that a president obsessed with being tougher than his predecessor elected for a feel-good (and, in his mind, look good) bit of murder. He seems to have acted without much thought as to what would come of it.

At worst, this politics of denial appears to reflect not a misguided tactic but an actual, rather stupid conviction. “Just wondering,” Michael Moore, the liberal filmmaker, posted on Twitter, “is there an American General for whom millions of us would turn out for his funeral?”

Moore was pointing to a huge turnout for Soleimani’s funeral, implying that he had achieved a hero status that would never be afforded any American war criminal. Soleimani no doubt enjoyed some support among a population beset by sanctions and as scared of ISIS as any American (and with more reason), though some of the attendees came out at the government’s, ahem, encouragement. But even if pro-Soleimani expressions were entirely organic, that’s no more the final word on his legacy than if, say, Donald Trump were to ever draw a crowd as large as he wants to believe attended his inauguration.

At an anti-war demonstration in D.C. organized by the grotesque ANSWER Coalition and the cringey Code Pink, one speaker was more explicit, declaring that “Soleimani was considered a hero in the region,” not just in Iran (where he also helped kill protesters), for leading “the Resistance Axis against U.S. imperial aggression.”

There is a better, non-sickening approach: true internationalism, in solidarity with those victimized by all war criminals, foreign or domestic. The War Resisters League, founded in 1923, “has long recognized the need for an anti-war movement that takes into account the multiple imperial actors in the world,” reads a statement issued after the assassination of Soleimani. While recognizing that imperialists deflect from their own crimes by pointing to the crimes of others, WRL does not take this as an excuse to be reactionary. They don’t simply deny the crimes of one to focus on others.

“In Syria,” the group notes, “General Qasem Soleimani was responsible for providing militia power, like that of Kata’ib Hezbollah, to support Assad’s war on Syrian civilians — which is why we understand many Syrians feel some relief that a major material and political ally of Bashar al Assad is no longer alive.” At the same time, “we also recognize that true justice would have been putting war criminals, including Assad, Soleimani, Muhandis, and Trump on trial.”

That perspective is shared by the healthier end of the anti-war movement. In Los Angeles, home to the largest Iranian diaspora outside the Islamic Republic, people with human ties to the region are leading the action, resulting in solidarity with victims of imperialism and “anti-imperialist” dictators alike. There’s an explicit rejection of all reactionary nationalism.

So, we see, the right formula isn’t hard to come by: Oppose an extrajudicial killing without whitewashing the dead killer’s evil.

That’s the best way to oppose war, and the best way to avoid the fate of deniers and cranks like George Galloway, who end up discredited, far removed from power, and deplatformed from everything but a Russian state broadcaster. And deservedly so.