There is also the problem of Trump himself. Because killing Soleimani was very much his decision—reflecting the impulsiveness and disarray a decision by him implies—it seems fair to assume that one’s view of the president will affect how one interprets the fallout from Soleimani’s killing. Correcting for subconscious bias isn’t easy, but at the very least, observers should be aware of the Trump effect.

Middle East experts, and particularly those from the region, have tended to be less alarmist than most other commentators. These experts are likely to be less fixated on Trump himself and less likely to put the United States at the center of their analysis. And they are more likely to be aware of the sheer scale of brutality, mass murder, and sectarian cleansing that Soleimani helped orchestrate. Soleimani wasn’t just another bad guy. He was one of the region’s worst. (Yet another humanitarian catastrophe has been unfolding in Syria, but it has garnered little attention. The Assad regime, with crucial military support from Iran and Russia, has been bombing Idlib province. More than 200,000 Syrians have already fled, and hundreds of thousands more could be forced from their homes.)

It is not an overstatement to say that Qassem Soleimani “haunted” the Arab world. As Kim Ghattas wrote here in The Atlantic, “Soleimani was so central to almost every regional event in the past two decades that even people who hate him can’t believe he could die.” It is a rich irony that as Democrats portrayed the strike as one of the worst foreign-policy blunders of the Trump presidency, a significant number of Syrians and Iraqis rejoiced—one of the very few times they have reacted positively to something, anything, that the United States has done. Their interests, of course, are not the same as Americans’, but there should at the very least be an effort to understand why they might have celebrated.

Read: Qassem Soleimani haunted the Arab world

In trying to process and respond to Soleimani’s killing, the left finds itself in a bind, torn between two competing impulses. The first impulse combines an opposition to Western imperialism with a justified skepticism toward the use of U.S. military force. Human beings desire, or perhaps even need, moral clarity. Considering America’s destructive record in the Middle East, it is easy to assume that we are the problem, particularly when the resort to military action is buttressed by murky legal rationales. The second impulse is the left’s long-standing tradition of solidarity with the victims of repression and with populations rather than the regimes that subjugate them. In the unique context of Soleimani and the Iranian regime, this second concern comes into direct conflict with the first.

It’s impossible to resolve this tension, and the best one can hope for is that it be marshaled in the service of creative policy ideas. Still, too much of the analysis on the left seems to have erred on the side of anti-imperialist critique with insufficient attention to what Iran has actually been doing for years—at tremendous human cost to Syrians and to other civilian populations in the region. It is understandably difficult to view the Iranian regime as an aggressor when it has found itself in the sights of the world’s most powerful country, which has unparalleled military projection and the largest military budget of any state in human history.