There were plenty of reasons for U.S. officials (among others) to want to be rid of a man whom David Petraeus, the former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, once described as “a truly evil figure.” But Suleimani wasn’t the leader of a stateless terrorist group; he was a top government official of a sovereign state. As one defense analyst observed, “This is the equivalent of Iran killing the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and then taking credit for it.” The potential consequences are therefore much bigger than those when U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr Baghdadi.
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