OPINION:
President Donald Trump, with his airstrike order against Iraq’s airport that left dead Iran’s top Revolutionary Guard leader, Gen. Qassem Soleiman, didn’t just set the regime on notice that this administration takes seriously attacks on American citizens.
The airstrike also served as a message to the United Nations that went like this: America’s got this; your opinion isn’t necessary.
And when it comes to America’s sovereignty versus global interests, that’s a message that just can’t be sent enough.
The pinheads at the United Nations, of course, are whining.
“The targeted killings of Qasem Soleiman and Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis are most l[i]kely unlawful and violate international human rights law: Outside the context of active hostilities, the use of drones or other means for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal,” wrote UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial executions Agnes Callamard, on Twitter.
And the @UN-Spokesperson Twitter feed, meanwhile, read: “Secretary-General @antonioguterres has consistently advocated for de-escalation in the Gulf. He is deeply concerned with the recent escalation. This is a moment in which leaders must exercise maximum restraint. The world cannot afford another war in the Gulf.”
Doesn’t the global body have a 16-year-old’s killing to investigate, or something? You know, the kid called Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, the boy killed in 2011 by a drone strike ordered by Barack Obama — an order that came just a couple weeks after another drone strike, also ordered by Barack Obama, killed his father, Anwar al-Awlaki? And all that after Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. How rude.
It’s not that murderous terrorist dad Awlaki was a poor innocent; it’s that he was an American citizen, killed by Obama order, absent any kind of constitutional due process. His son, meanwhile, Abdulrahman, had no known ties to terrorism but was still killed by Obama-ordered drone strike a couple weeks later, absent once again any kind of due process. The Obama administration’s response to that? Oops. It was an accident.
As The Intercept wrote it in January of 2017: “In 2010, President Obama directed the CIA to assassinate an American citizen in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, despite the act that he had never been charged with (let alone convicted of) any crime, and the agency successfully carried out that order a year later with a September 2011 drone strike. … Two weeks after the killing of Awklaki, a separate CIA drone strike in Yemen killed his 16-years-old American-born son.”
Callamard, care to comment? Mr. Secretary-General?
Interestingly, Obama’s foreign policy style, when it didn’t involve American citizens, anyway — when it involved, say, Iran’s terrorist regime — was not so much one of military action as it was of passing out cupcakes and begging for forgiveness. Even when Iran took U.S. sailors hostage in 2016 and blasted their pictures all over Tehran billboards for propaganda purposes, to paint America in a weak light, Team Obama’s big response was to call on then-Secretary of State John Kerry to telephone all the regime-connected authorities and please, oh pretty please, beg for the sailors’ release.
No drone strikes there.
Now fast-forward to the Trump era and the patience of this White House as Iran attacked U.S. ally Saudi Arabia’s oil tanker in the Red Sea. As Iran attacked numerous oil tankers traversing the Strait of Hormuz. As Iran shot down a U.S. drone. All those incidents happened within the past few months.
Fast-forward to the Trump presidency and the recent credible threats of Quds Force chief Soleiman to unleash evil attacks on American citizens, American interests, American allies. Fast-forward to Trump and the Iran-backed attack on U.S. Embassy workers in Iraq.
In the face of all that, Trump ordered a strike.
And the United Nations wants to cry foul at the mission’s success?
“Under customary international law States can take military action if the threatened attack is imminent, no other means would deflect it and the action is proportionate,” Callamard wrote. “An individual’s past involvement in ’terrorist’ attacks is not sufficient to make his targeting for killing lawful.”
Bunk.
In UN logic, Trump only would’ve been justified in striking at Soleiman if Soleiman took out Trump first.
Guess the pinheads at the United Nations will have to find another pansy to rebuke. Because this president, thankfully, is committed to America First.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE.
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