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How to Decide When Blowing Someone Up Is the Right Thing to Do
It isn’t always obvious.
Of course, a priori (that’s Latin for “before we know better”), we probably want to assume that blowing someone up is not the right thing to do. This position has among its many advantages the virtue of complying with Rabbi Hillel’s famous statement of the Golden Rule: “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to another.” Most of us would consider being blown up to be “hateful” (I don’t think that’s too strong a word), so we should advocate the blowing up of others only sparingly. That just seems like good sense to me.
But what do you do with someone whose business card leads with “Terrorist Kingpin” and who once posed for one of those Most Interesting Man in the World beer commercials that reads: “I don’t always facilitate acts of mass murder, but… // Who am I kidding? Of course I do!” ? What do you do with someone like that?
Well, if you’re the list-making type (I’m not), you’ve probably got a shortlist somewhere on your desk that includes the people who you think should be blown up. So what you do is you add that guy’s name to the list. Depending on who else is on it, you might put his name near the top. (If your list only has one name on it, you’re either a charitable soul who sees the good in almost everyone, or it just says “Trump.”)
If you’re not the list-making type, just try to remember the guy’s name, Qassem Soleimani, for example, as we go through the rest of this exercise.
That’s right: we’re not done yet. It’s all well and good to say “yeah, I think this is a guy who should be blown up,” but there’s a little more intellectual heavy lifting that has to occur before you actually push the button. You have to ask yourself this question: “Is the world likely to be a better place if he’s blown up, or is it likely to be worse?” Because however satisfying it might be to blow someone up, it can’t always be about immediate gratification, about doing what feels good. We shouldn’t lose sight of the bigger goal, which is a nicer world full of happier people.
So the most important question to ask is whether or not the individual in question is directly involved in doing bad things — not just bad things, but really bad things. (Pro tip: If the answer to that is “no,” consider reevaluating your criteria for picking people whom you’d like to see blown up.) In the case of our example, that’s an easy one: yes, Qassem Soleimani is, well, was, directly involved in doing really bad things. He was kind of a rockstar at doing really bad things. (One can easily imagine that, had TIME magazine realized that the window was closing as quickly as it was, they might have chosen this terrorist rockstar as their Person of the Year. He was that big a deal. Ah well. Missed opportunity.)
So we’re good to go? Can I hit the button now?
That’s “May I hit the button now,” and the answer is “no, not quite.”
Because it’s possible that there will be ramifications to blowing this fellow up that will lead to a net negative outcome that will create a less nice world full of less happy people. We can’t selfishly go blowing up anyone we think deserves it. We have to think of others.
Unfortunately, while it’s pretty easy to perform that first-order evaluation of inherent blowupworthiness, it’s sometimes extraordinarily difficult to predict what the larger outcome will be. That’s because human behavior is a complex emergent phenomenon, particularly when multiple cultures and cruel dictators with precarious grips on their rule are involved. We can guess, but no one really knows what will happen.
So let’s guess, using our example of the late Qassem Soleimani.
Will Iran launch a ground invasion of the United States? Probably not.
Will Iran engage in increased terrorism against the United States or our allies. Maybe. Of course, Iran does terrorism anyway; remember Mr. Soleimani’s business card? One can reasonably wonder how much underutilized terrorist capacity Iran has in place in foreign countries. One can also wonder what Iran planned to do with that capacity, and if precipitating an increase in terrorism is really more about changing the timing than the events themselves. On the other hand, blowing up someone as rockstar famous as Qassem Soleimani sends a signal; doing it without even talking to Nancy Pelosi first suggests a worrisome (if you’re an Iranian dictator) nonchalance on the part of whoever pushed the button. So perhaps this will actually disincentivize Iran, vis a vis doing terrorist-y kinds of things, at least for a little while. We really don’t know.
Is this likely to make the situation less stable? Well, we don’t know. The situation wasn’t actually “stable” to begin with: people were still being blown up courtesy of Mr. Soleimani and, however cavalier I may appear to be about blowing people up, I am not under the illusion that a world in which people are unexpectedly exploded is in any rigorous sense “stable” — not, that is, unless people blowing up is the default condition. (And I took a dim view of that in the second paragraph of this rather lengthy post, and will continue to actively discourage it.)
But is this going to plunge us into large-scale war with Iran? Only if we want it to. We can send thousands of troops to Iran and fight a long and miserable, and ultimately probably unsuccessful, ground war. Or we can blow people and things up like we’re playing a Nintendo game, with about as much human cost on our side. The human cost on the other side is non-trivial, but we have a lot of control over that… and the Iranian regime itself is not gentle with its people nor with anyone else.
So what’s the answer? Will the world be a better place, or a worse place?
We can’t be sure. It could go either way. I think the more likely outcome is that this will discourage Iranian aggression, weaken the Iranian regime, and nudge us on the path to a better world. But no one really knows for sure.
What we do know, however, is that a guy who is directly responsible for policies and actions that have claimed thousands of innocent lives, and who uses terrorism and the destruction of civilians as a political tool to achieve the goals of a tyrannical and oppressive government, will be blown up.
So this is one of those cases where blowing someone up probably makes sense.
Published in Foreign Policy
They don’t set up next to hospitals.
They set up in hospitals. And libraries. And schools. And mosques.
We’ve spent bazillions of dollars inventing and refining very precise weapons with a very small CEP (circular error probable) to ensure effect. It has the happy side benefit of reducing the possibility of civilian casualties.
Except that it’s not.
Once someone sets up military units and facilities in or near sensitive things like “cultural sites,” they make that spot a target.
That’s an actual war crime, by the way – “using civilians as shields.”
“Not wearing uniforms while initiating combat” is another, which means that Soleimani was actually engaged in a war crime at the moment he was being blown up, because troops under his direct command were fighting while wearing civilian clothes.
You messed up your attributions – I didn’t say that. TBA did.
He also had a pretty face which is a not inconsiderable factor in recruitment and popularity, particularly if you want the Times to squee over you.
Although, if one is sufficiently evil, looks are no bar to the NYT(AFN) squeeing over you.
Yeah, they are soulful enough to look below the surface for what really matters; their crushes develop into deep and lasting loves.
Although, if one is sufficiently evil, looks are no bar to the NYT(AFN) squeeing over you.
Mea culpa
But Trump was not saying collateral damage. He was saying he would target cultural heritage sites to hurt the public morale. A crime under the Geneva Conventions similar to genocide.
For 40 years we have been telling the Iranian people our fight is with the thugs that hijacked your revolution, not the Iranian people. Everything Trump Touches Dies.
“Everything Trump Touches Dies.”
Well, in the case of General Soleimani, that seems to be the case.
On the other hand, the economy seems to be doing pretty well.
It might well be a war crime to gratuitously destroy cultural heritage sites. However, it’s certainly not a war crime to say you’ve targeted cultural heritage sites, nor even to actually target them.
Do you believe everything Trump says? I don’t, and I voted for him once and plan to do it again.
I think your distinction is too cute by half. How does it profit our country, how does it not hurt our country, to not admit Trump was unambiguously wrong on this and that the American people will not stand by while such threats are made in our name? I guarantee anti-Americans like Congresswomen Omar and Tlaib will throw this back in our faces for the next twenty years.
I can accept that there are a lot of good people that will vote for Trump because of the Dem’s position on fourth-trimester abortion or like issues, it just drives me crazy that people flinch from admitting the man should not be our President in the first place. He is unfit for office.
PB, I guess I just don’t see the harm.
Look, most people in America aren’t foolish enough to believe everything Trump tweets. Most people in Iran probably aren’t either.
When and if Trump blows up a cultural heritage site — one of the ones the happy Islamists haven’t already destroyed because they were offended by them — then I’ll condemn that. I’ll say Trump should NOT have destroyed that cultural heritage site! That was a bad decision, and I condemn it.
Seriously. I’ll say that.
But at least half the things Trump tweets never happen. And I think one has to be pretty gullible, and also probably walking around looking for excuses to get all bent out of shape, to believe that Trump is actually going to order the destruction of a mosque or what have you. Do you seriously think that’s going to happen?
This all seems like a very silly thing to get worked up about. I’ll save my outrage for outrageous acts, not outrageous tweets that most thinking people will greet with skepticism.
It certainly would be nice if we would stop sending anti-American representatives to our federal government offices.
It’s a clever turn of phrase. Created by Rick Wilson. So, he’s got that going for him.
Which is nice.