Letter to The Observer editor

In response to 1st September article by Simon Tisdall: In an unheroic age, Putin, Trump and Netanyahu are sick parodies of great men

Simon Tisdall tries to group Putin, Netanyahu and Trump as the three great despots of the modern age. Most cheaply, this is done by pointing to the blood on each of their hands. Putin has killed 11,000 non-combatants in Ukraine; Netanyahu 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza; and Trump assassinated Qasem Soleimani, Tisdall argues. I recognise an outlier when I read one.

Soleimani commanded the Quds Force, one of five branches of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is designated a terrorist organisation by the United States and the European Parliament. He provided military strategy to Bashar al-Assad's bloody totalitarian regime during the Syrian Civil War, which has claimed the lives of at least a quarter of a million civilians - and counting. As the self-proclaimed architect of Iran’s foreign policy, its links to the autocratic, crackpot gangsters, the Taliban, can too be traced to him. Soleimani himself was sanctioned by the United Nations and the European Union, and was on US terror watchlists.

I won’t try to argue the Soleimani assassination was wise, beyond moral reproach, or even of highest priority to US security, but it certainly doesn’t land Trump in the league of Netanyahu and Putin’s, who – like Soleimani – have left thousands upon thousands of mourning civilian families in their wakes. 

Perhaps either Omar Al-Bashir, Kim Jong Un, or Isaias Afewerki would’ve been the sounder choice for Trump’s place in the trifecta of global evil.