With all due respect to Col. WIlkerson, the statement:
No general, especially not one at the level that Soleimani was operating — no general reaches out and kills someone. Nor does he reach out to a team and say, “Kill someone.†Nor does he reach out to a squad or a platoon or a company and say, “Kill someone.†He gives orders at the top, sets strategic purposes and principles and general guidelines, and he boosts morale, and he travels around, and he talks to the teams and so on — exactly what Soleimani was so good at.
Just isn't so.
During WWII, we had intelligence from communication intercepts on the flight plans of Admiral Yamamoto and specifically targeted his aircraft; the operation was a success. One of the most capable minds in the Japanese Navy was eliminated, the Admiral who planned the Pearl Harbor attack. Now, the orders didn't come from Generals, they came from Admirals, but that's a minor technicality. AFAIK, the President was not consulted.
some discussion here, from 2017Salient points:
The General was not hit in Iran, but in Iraq.
He was there, plotting/planning further operations against US personnel (as if that is not an "act of war").
IMHO, that made him fair game.
Whatever he had allegedly done 'for us' or against the Taliban (which might have served Iranian goals as much or more than ours, per se), it was the operations being planned and conducted against Amerians, not just in Iraq but elsewhere that made him a target. Things change.
When I was in High School, we had such good relations with the Shah of Iran that we sold them F-14 Tomcat fighters, and while those might not have been the 'luxury package' we retained for our own use, these were still the premier air superiority fighter of the day. After the 'revolution' by Khomeni, those planes gradually decayed for lack of spare parts. It took Ronald Reagan to get those American hostages taken during that revolution home, and some gutsy moves by the Canadians, too. The Desert 1 disaster (Operation Eagle Claw) not only cost lives, but underscored the need for something like JSOC to take care of the nuts and bolts of daring rescue missions involving interservice cooperation, but alerted the Iranians to be alert for further military attempts to free the 52 US hostages held by the regime.
Since then, Iran has become an enemy, not just of the US, but the Persians have definite aspirations of hegemony, not just from oil production, but militarily in the region. Those aspirations primarily see the US as an interloper, interfering with their dreams of domination--not just in a military sense, but through whatever means available to the Islamist and even first tier powers to be utilized in those aims. The use of asymmetrical warfare through proxy fighters and terrorist acts are well enough documented, and in other theaters, away from Iran, those means have been employed against US Service personnel and civilians. Those attacks were masterminded, encouraged, and likely enabled by the Iranian regime in general, and General Sulemani in particular, in person, directly involved in the planning, if not execution of these attacks.
Referring back to the execution of Yamamoto during WWII, taking the head off the proverbial snake was an opportunity that we could not fail to at least attempt to take advantage of, and we did, successfully.
Once again, presented with an opportunity to engage and eliminate someone whose leadership presented a clear and present danger to our personnel, both military and civilian, we took advantage of that opportunity, and did so with success. The crime here would have been to make no effort to terminate the man who had plotted and planned attacks on our own people, our embassy, our troops. In that sense, Suleimani had made himself a combatant and fair game, especially on foreign soil, where those attacks were taking place.
