The United States needs to stop going to war in the Middle East if we want to stabilize the region in the name of “freedom” and “democracy.” The killing of Iranian General Soleimani and the consequential escalation of tensions between Iran and the United States only makes war between the two countries seem inevitable. With the strike on Soleimani, Trump made the possibility of war with Iran seem real.

On January 3rd, President Trump ordered an unmanned drone strike on Qasem Soleimani, an extremely popular military general of Iran, and was subsequently killed in an Iraqi airport along with several other American-allied Iraqi officials. Not only was the assassination of Soleimani an unneeded military escalation of U.S.-Iran relations, but it was also a massive overreach of U.S. foreign intervention.  The legality of the strike within Iraq’s borders is already being put into question by Democrats, the U.N., and some Republicans. 

 While Soleimani has been in American sights for well over ten years, it was deemed too risky by previous presidents due to the possibility that it could escalate tensions between Iran and the United States. Trump’s strike on Soleimani put Iran on high alert, resulting in a strike on two military bases in Iraq; housing U.S. troops and Iranian commander Abdollah Araghi, vowing “harsher revenge soon.” The strike reportedly resulted in no casualties, however, it shows Iran’s willingness and readiness to attack stationed troops around the Middle East. Senior Ethan McQuade said, “It was justified, Soleimani attacked an American embassy and he was a threat to America.” While true, the relationship between Iran and America is much more complicated than simply the last month of escalation. The situation is a decades long, complicated dispute that goes back to the 1979 Iranian Revolution. 

Iran is a much wealthier, larger, and populous nation than the ones the U.S. has grown accustomed to invading. As Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times said, “Rather than a last resort, war now offers no resort. War can no longer be defended as the thing to do after everything else has failed. War must be seen as failure itself.”