The right thing for all the wrong reasons?
Welcome to the moral mess that is American cruise missile diplomacy
Ali Khamenei is dead. Should we be happy?
Ali Hosseini Khamenei was the supreme leader of Iran from 1989 to 2026. He was formally titled ‘Ayatollah’, as he was the Twelver Shia clerical leader of the country. But for all intents and purposes, he was a totalitarian dictator who exercised complete authority over the armed forces, judiciary, media, and political organizations of Iran. If Iran did something, Khamenei was the guy responsible for it.
Under his leadership, Iran exported violence and terrorism for over thirty years, engaging in state sponsored terrorism by supporting groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and various Palestinian terrorist groups. Iran sent billions of dollars to the Assad regime while imprisoning, torturing, and executing untold thousands of its own citizens.
Iran’s drones, his drones, are killing Ukrainians (and Israelis) on an almost daily basis. Under his leadership, Iran pursued a nuclear program to ensure ‘energy security’, despite the fact that Iran has vast oil reserves, and had no real reason to be concerned about energy production shortfalls. Unchecked, Ali might have supplied the weapons for the world’s first act of nuclear terrorism.
He could be the person who is most singularly responsible for Shia Islam being being unfairly demonized in the west as a religion of exclusively violent criminal extremists, despite it being practiced by well over two hundred million peaceful people.
He was a damaged man who the world is better off without. His name belongs on the list of history’s greatest monsters, with people like Joseph Stalin, Pol-pot, and Saddam Hussein.
And yet, the question still lingers, should we celebrate his death? Is it a good thing that someone this toxic to humanity as a whole has been murdered?
He was killed in an act of unprovoked aggression. This new war in Iraq is a conflict started by Donald Trump, without any real justification or tangible disagreement between the US and Iran. He was murdered because he was simply inconvenient to the Trump presidency and American interests. This is hardly the moral high ground.
Depending on your particular political beliefs, it might even be said that the war was started to distract an angry voter base from Trump’s failing domestic programs, political blunders, and indefensible sexual crimes. This is an unproven conjecture at this point, though I am sure that time will eventually reveal all.
This revelation will likely be of little consolidation to Ali, however.
Trump once claimed that he could walk out into the street and kill someone without any repercussions. He never said that that person had to be an American.
I cannot help but note the similarities and differences between the death of Ali Khamenei, and the death of Osama Bin Laden. Both were killed by US military forces in what amounted to a summary execution. Both were active enemies of the United States.
But Khamenei was responsible for death and suffering orders of magnitude larger than Bin Laden could have ever hoped to achieve, and yet nobody really seems to care. There was little reaction to the announcement of his demise. When Germany surrendered in 1945, there were wild spontaneous parties in the streets. How can we claim this man was a mortal enemy of America, when we seem largely indifferent to his fate?
These are hard questions, with few solid answers.
I can say that destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities was probably a wise thing to do. Disarming an opponent before they can strike you might well save two lives in the long run. But is it necessary to kill your opponent after he has been disarmed?
Ali was killed simply to send a message to the world, ‘Don’t cross America. Don’t cross Donald Trump’. If we are spreading unwarranted destruction and death, aren’t we the terrorists? Are we not even trying to pretend to be the ‘good guys’ anymore?
The world is a better place after Ali’s death. But it isn’t a more just or safer place. What do we gain by trading one for the other?