The Pentagon announced late Thursday night that the U.S. military killed a top-ranking senior Iranian official in an airstrike carried out at the direction of President Donald Trump. The killing is understood as a major escalation in U.S.-Iran relations, prompting online conversations about the prospect of an impending “World War 3.”
Last night, as I watched our latest existential terror unfold through a torrent of World War 3 memes, I found myself wondering not just what political leaders will do but also what the people of both countries and the broader world will experience as we prepare for what now feels like inevitable further escalations.
While the potential for large-scale global political conflict is palpable, the more immediate concern will be the drumbeat for marching forward with military action that could take us there. How to make sense of it, this immediate future that now rides on an ever-thinner razor’s edge?
First, we have to establish how we got here. Last night, the Pentagon put out a statement saying that the U.S. military had killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani “at the direction of the president” with the aim of “deterring future Iranian attack plans.” The Pentagon statement claimed that Soleimani, leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, was responsible for hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries to U.S. and coalition service members.
Trump’s history with Iran isn’t particularly friendly. Trump called Iran a “rogue state whose chief exports are violence, bloodshed and chaos" in a 2017 United Nations speech. In 2018, he pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal (aka the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) negotiated by his predecessor, President Barack Obama. That same year, he threatened the Iranian president on Twitter.
As laid out on a timeline by Al Jazeera, Iran refused to meet demands the Trump administration made after ending the JCPOA. In response, Trump launched two new rounds of sanctions in 2018, adding to a lineage of U.S. sanctions against the country dating back to Ronald Reagan’s administration. In 2019, Trump increased sanctions against Iran and designated the IRGC a terrorist force.
Recently, Trump beefed up U.S. military presence in the Middle East following riots and attacks on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Iraq — one of Iran’s two neighbors that has been the theatre for a protracted U.S.-led war and one that’s been deeply enmeshed in the history of U.S.-Iranian relations since Iran’s 1979 revolution. The embassy riots reportedly came in response to U.S. strikes on facilities tied to an Iranian-backed militia, which was itself a response to a rocket attack that killed a U.S. contractor.
So how does Soleimani fit into all this? As reported by the Washington Post, Soleimani was the leader of a group known as the Quds Force, part of the IRGC, which is a major branch of Iran’s military that arose after the 1979 Islamic revolution. The Quds Force has a reputation for being the IRGC’s elite and efficient soldiers.
In his role, according to Al Jazeera, Soleimani helmed Iranian operations in foreign countries like Iraq, where he was involved in the fight against the Islamic State (aka ISIS), and Syria, where he supported President Bashar al-Assad. According to the Associated Press, he was also allied with several militia groups in countries across the Middle East.
If it seems like Soleimani was a big deal, it’s because he very much was. Considered by some the second most powerful man in the country, Soleimani’s execution at Trump’s directive is the exact sort of geopolitical conflict that could reignite long-standing tensions in extremely unpredictable ways. Some time after Trump tweeted out a low-resolution picture of a U.S. flag, Iranian ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed “harsh vengeance,” and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani promised “revenge.”
Nobody seems to know what to make of all this. As journalists rushed out quick bios of Soleimani, a visual guide to the U.S. airstrike that killed him, and ceaseless live updates on the story, Twitter cycled through trending topics trying to make some light of the dark situation. Beyond the World War 3 memes, some people pointed out that Trump’s frequent tweets about Obama starting a war with Iran to win an election seemed relevant. Many others discovered that receiving college financial aid through FAFSA requires registering for selective service. Others jokingly considered another Area 51 raid for some extraterrestrial salvation.
Unfortunately, as climate justice activists are wont to remind us, there is no planet B. The questions about what happens next are anxiety-inducing, especially for people in Iran and the surrounding region.
United Nations population figures estimate that roughly 80 million people live in Iran. Estimates for Iraq are near 40 million and, for Afghanistan, around 35 million. Iran also has historical tensions with other regional powers, like Saudi Arabia and Israel (two of the United States’ biggest allies in the region) and is currently aligned with global powers China and Russia (representing two of the United States’ more contentious political relationships).
If a U.S. invasion of Iran was as deadly and prolonged as those in Iraq or Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands could die, many of them civilians. If this conflict somehow became as deadly as World War I or World War II, it could mean countless more killed, injured, or displaced from their homes.
Simply put, the question of war with Iran must be answered with a loud and emphatic no, as planned protest actions for Saturday, January 4, already intend to communicate. Whatever legal framework the president and his supporters might cling to in order to justify Trump’s right to direct the attack, the reality is that this assassination is an act of war — whether the White House wants to officially designate it as one or not.
Some are cheering Soleimani’s killing, publishing extremely reductive takes about the removal of the “world’s No. 1 bad guy.” But Trump’s directive has unknown potential to irrevocably destabilize an entire region and put millions at risk. And that is very, very scary.
Editor's note: The dek of this article originally stated that the airstrike against Soleimani occurred in Iran rather than Iraq.
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