No War With Iran
At the beginning of a new decade, we find ourselves, again, at the brink of war with Iran. This time, the inciting incident was President Trump’s assassination by drone of Major General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
This assassination represents a major escalation in the ongoing conflict between the US and Iran over the future of Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Setting aside the legal questions relating to the assassination—the administration was quick to add the words “imminent threat” to all its press releases in a feeble effort to invoke some notion of self defense after the fact (never mind that the UN Charter allows self defense only when an attack occurs)—the more important question here is yet again a US misreading of the larger dynamics in that part of the world.
Why is Reacher so popular? After all, the man is a human wrecking ball. As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in the New Yorker in 2015, Reacher has killed over two hundred people since making his first appearance in Killing Floor. His readers don’t seem to mind the death toll he leaves in his wake. Reacher would say the victims deserved it. He certainly doesn’t agonize about it, a strategy he suggests to whoever happens to be around and might be squeamish.
Let’s get this out of the way first. Yes, the European Union is a bureaucratic institution with a democracy deficit. Its regulatory role is often experienced as burdensome. All this has been true for a long time, but the post-Cold War expansion has made it even more unwieldy.