Paul Pillar makes a very important point in his commentary on the Soleimani assassination:

In addition to avoiding the negative practical consequences, foreswearing the assassination of foreign leaders is a matter of principle. It gets to the character and values of a nation, and to the nation’s self-image and self-esteem. Killing other nations’ leaders is not the sort of thing a good nation does. It is the sort of thing terrorists do.

By doing it, Trump has further discredited whatever he says about terrorism. To talk about Soleimani in the same breath as references to slain ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as Trump did in his statement following the assassination, grossly misrepresents Soleimani’s role and status.

The president generally chafes at legal restrictions that hold the U.S. to a higher standard. As we have seen, he enthuses about plundering other countries’ resources, he talks about destroying their cultural sites, and he supports war criminals at home and abroad. The president would rather have the U.S. lower itself to the level of its adversaries or possibly sink even lower than they are so long as it provides some temporary advantage. It is sometimes said that Trump simply strips away the pretenses that other presidents have kept up, but doing this has a debasing and corrupting effect on what we as a nation are willing to accept. Just as Bush’s support for using torture encouraged many of his partisans to defend torture as acceptable, Trump’s embrace of war criminals and illegal assassination are encouraging his partisans to defend these outrageous tactics and normalize them.

There are important differences between state officials and non-state actors, and one of these is that we have accepted that different norms apply in how our government views and treats them. That is one of the many reasons why Trump’s decision last year to designate the IRGC a terrorist organization was so ill-advised and dangerous. By choosing to treat a branch of another state’s military as if it were a terrorist group, the Trump administration paved the way for killing a high-ranking Iranian officer. A senior military commander is not the same as a leader of a non-state extremist group, not least because he is a representative of a sovereign government and killing him involves initiating hostilities against that government.

There is remarkable reluctance in some quarters even to use the word assassination to describe what the U.S. military did when it deliberately killed Soleimani. Mike Bloomberg was apoplectic that Bernie Sanders would use the word to describe Soleimani’s killing despite the fact that it is clearly the correct word to use:

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg balked at fellow 2020 candidate and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ suggestion that President Trump carried out an “assassination” when he ordered a lethal strike on Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

When asked about the descriptor, Bloomberg said: “If he was talking about killing the general … this is a guy who had an awful amount of American blood on his hands. I think that’s an outrageous thing to say.”

“Nobody that I know of would think that we did something wrong in getting the general,” he said, before adding the U.S. had a “right” and “obligation” to pursue Soleimani.

Besides showing how awful Bloomberg’s foreign policy judgment is, this is a reminder of the extraordinary arrogance required to justify using force to attack other states on a whim. In Bloomberg’s world, the U.S. has a “right” and “obligation” to trample on international law and attack another state. In the real world, the U.S. is obliged not to do that.

When we think about what we would say if the positions were reversed, it is easy to understand that it was an assassination. If a foreign military had bombed a convoy carrying a top U.S. or allied officer, there is no question that we would call it an assassination attempt, and we know that we would denounce it as a lawless act. The unwillingness to call the illegal assassination by its proper name reflects a refusal to face up to the reality of what the president ordered. If some Americans reject the term, it is because they want to pretend that the action was more legitimate and justifiable than it was. It was an assassination, and it was illegal. It doesn’t matter how bad the assassinated man was. What matters is that our government broke the law when it killed him.

The targeted killings of Qasem Soleimani and Abu mahdi al muhandi most likely violate international law incl human rights law. Lawful justifications for such killings are very narrowly defined and it is hard to imagine how any of these can apply to these killings. #Iraq

— Agnes Callamard (@AgnesCallamard) January 3, 2020

If we can’t admit that, we won’t have much luck making sense of anything that follows from it. To believe otherwise is to imagine that the U.S. government exists as a superpower vigilante state with the authority to kill anyone it deems worthy of death. Contrary to what some hawks seem to think, it is not the responsibility of our government to act as the world’s executioner.

The AP reports:

After Friday’s targeted killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, newsrooms struggled with the question: Had the United States just carried out an assassination? And should news stories about the killing use that term?

The AP Stylebook, considered a news industry bible, defines assassination as “the murder of a politically important or prominent individual by surprise attack.”

Although the United States and Iran have long been adversaries and engaged in a shadow war in the Middle East and elsewhere, the U.S. has never declared formal war on Iran. So the targeted killing of a high Iranian state and military official by a surprise attack was “clearly an assassination,” said Mary Ellen O’Connell, an expert in international law and the laws of war at the University of Notre Dame School of Law.

The words we use to describe things matter, and we should strive to describe things as accurately as possible. The U.S. government assassinated an Iranian general, and our governments are on the cusp of war because of that action. If the positions were reversed, there is no question that we would consider the attack an assassination and would see the attack as an act of war against us. The decision to carry out an assassination against an official in a government that we are not at war with was wrong and illegal, and by doing this our government has opened the door to the evils of unnecessary war.