It has been 24 hours since America droned Qasem Soleimani near Baghdad airport. Now both Iran and the United States are getting ready to deal with a new reality in the Middle East that has (quite literally) exploded into being.
There is a mutual recognition that when Soleimani died, the old rules of the game died alongside him. What is instructive about his assassination is not that it happened, but that it took so long. After all, this was a man whose carefully posed portrait spread across Twitter every time he visited yet another of Iran’s many wars in the region. If I knew when Haji Qasem was in Syria, then the Americans surely did too.
He had survived because, under the Obama and early Trump administrations, Washington feared the consequences of a dead Soleimani more than the malignancy of a living one. That has ended. The message is clear: American toleration for Iranian excess is not endless, even if it comes with a price.
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