Thank you for removing the entire point of my post and then calling it a mischaracterization with false analogies. How very honest of you. And please feel free to beat on the war drums while you don't have to bear any of the consequences for your decisions. Conservative, Liberal, Democrat, Republican, other.. I don't know anyone with any ties to people who will be or have been in harms way who are treating this like an episode of GIJoe. The chickenhawks talk of blowing this up, killing that person, destroying this and don't understand what that actually means in terms of human cost. A casualty isn't just a number. It's a family dealing with a loved one that they'll never see again, knowing that their last memory was of excruciating pain. Or it's agony in a hospital bed, months trying to relearn basic skills, dealing with the sickness from massive doses of opiates and then the sickness of withdrawal, the depression they'll spend a lifetime fighting. Or its the daily fear of checking casualty lists.. hoping every day that its someone else's unit, someone else's loved one.
So to repeat the point of my post which you so bravely deleted: the bombings done under the Obama administration were at least loosely justified under the AUMFs of 2001 and 2002. When Obama sought congressional authorization to go after Assad in Syria, congress refused to vote on the matter and conservatives went around berating Obama. There is no legal justification for Trumps assassination. Soleimani was a terrible dude. So was Jeffrey Dahmer. It would not have been okay for the president to extra-judiciously assassinate Dahmner even if it would have saved lives because the rule of law is what separates us from savagery. Like it or not, Soleimani was not a non-state terrorist. Soleimani was a representative of the Iranian government operating on behalf of a sovereign state. That means quite a lot.
And you may not think that Soleimaini was a legitimate figure, but sadly your opinion means less than nothing. I don't think you're in any danger of retaliating against US Forces. The opinions that matter are the Iranian people. Have you seen the protests? The anger? The Iranian people's anger takes away any flexibility the Iranian government may have had. The Iranians **HAVE** to retaliate. They are going to have to attack US military targets, either in the US or in some other allied country. Americans are going to die. And what happens then? The pathetic chicken-hawks who are all too eager to send other peoples kids off to die may not have bothered to consider it yet, but everyone else already knows what's likely.
