The Assassination of Ali Khamenei

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Question: Doesn’t the United States’ killing of the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, violate the sovereignty of Iran?

There are two issues here. The first concerns the so-called “international law” embodied in the United Nations. The second concerns the morality of assassinating a dictator. I will address the latter first, since clarifying that issue sheds light on the former.

The United States was absolutely justified in killing Ali Khamenei. It was a good and moral act. Khamenei was one of the most evil political leaders on earth. Since taking power in 1989, he presided over a regime that systematically oppressed the Iranian people. His government relied on torture, imprisonment, and murder on a massive scale long before the recent protests.

The regime financed terrorism across the globe and was responsible for thousands of deaths. It ordered the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to machine-gun protesters in the streets. It imprisoned dissidents and executed political opponents. It enforced a system in which women could be beaten, imprisoned, or killed for removing their hijabs. Khamenei had no legitimate moral claim to power whatsoever, and neither did the regime he represented.

His death makes the world a safer place. Iranians who have risked their lives protesting the regime have long pleaded for international support. The collapse of the Islamic Republic would remove one of the most oppressive and aggressive regimes in the world. The United States and Israel should now finish the job by destroying Iran’s military capabilities and clearing the path for the Iranian people to overthrow the regime and establish a secular democracy.

Objection: “But what about Iranian sovereignty?”

The concept of sovereignty, in any morally meaningful sense, refers to the right of a free country to defend its territory from invasion by dictatorships. That right ultimately derives from the individual right to self-defence. Citizens in a free society delegate that right to their government, which exercises it through institutions such as the military.

Political sovereignty is not an intrinsic property of territory. It is a moral authority that exists only insofar as a government protects the rights of the individuals living under it. Because sovereignty derives from the protection of individual rights, it can only meaningfully apply to a rights-respecting state.

There is therefore no moral equivalence between a free country and a dictatorship such as the Islamic Republic of Iran. Dictatorial regimes systematically violate the rights of the people they rule and therefore have no legitimate claim to sovereignty.

A free country retains the moral right to destroy a dictatorial regime whenever it judges that regime to be a threat. The case for military action becomes strongest when a regime that brutally violates the rights of its own citizens also sponsors aggression or terrorism beyond its borders, as the Iranian regime has done for decades.

The idea that war is justified only when a threat is “imminent” is misguided. A regime whose ability to wage war depends only on the whim of an unaccountable tyrant, and which possesses the military capability to do so, constitutes a standing threat to freedom.

A moral war should be fought decisively and without hesitation in order to end the conflict as quickly as possible. As Napoleon observed:

“If you wage war, do so with energy and severity. It is the only means of making it shorter and thus less deplorable for humankind.”

Objection: “What about international law and the United Nations?”

The United Nations, which was supposedly created to secure world peace, has instead given authoritarian powers such as China and Russia the ability to veto measures necessary to achieve that goal. It has treated regimes like North Korea and Iran, which openly call for the destruction of the West, as legitimate partners in negotiation.

By granting dictatorships equal standing with free societies, the UN undermines the very concept of moral legitimacy in international relations. For that reason, it has zero moral authority.

When the United States and Israel ignore condemnations from unelected European officials or UN bodies, they are not defying justice. They are refusing to grant legitimacy to institutions that routinely empower tyrannies.

Objection: “What about innocent civilians?”

In any war, tragic civilian deaths will occur. But when military action is directed at leadership targets and military infrastructure, the responsibility for those casualties ultimately rests with the regime that created the conflict and that embeds its military apparatus within civilian society.

If Iranian leaders cared about their people, they could end the conflict tomorrow by surrendering. Their willingness to machine-gun protesters in the streets demonstrates that they do not.

The people who stand to benefit most from the destruction of the Islamic Republic are the Iranian people themselves. Notice also that those rushing to condemn the US strikes – ostensibly out of concern for civilian casualties – responded with deafening silence while Khamenei’s forces killed thousands of protesters (i.e. inflicted civilian casualties) in January. Iranians have endured decades of repression. They are the ones who marched in the streets for freedom despite the threat of live fire. They are the ones who may finally be able to live without fear of imprisonment, torture, or death for defying religious authority. That is the goal of the US strikes against their oppressors.

Compared to the systematic brutality of the Iranian regime, civilian casualties caused by targeted strikes against military leadership are minimal and represent the tragic but unavoidable costs of war. The ultimate responsibility for those costs lies with the regime that created and sustained the tyranny in the first place.