(CN) - In the initial stages of the Roman Empire’s decline in the first century A.D., Emperor Sulla dispatched his young but tactically brilliant son-in-law, Pompey, to the island of Sicily to bring his mortal enemies, the Marians, to heel.
The civil strife besetting the aging empire was taking its toll.
But Pompey, called the “teenage butcher” by his enemies, quickly outfoxed and subdued the Marians, restoring Sicily and its extensive reserves of grain to Emperor Sulla.
But Pompey didn’t stop there.
After the campaign he began a brutal reign of terror, executing a number of the Marians’ top generals and officials. The citizens of Sicily complained to Pompey, saying the rules of warfare forbid such extravagant bloodshed.
“Won't you stop citing laws to us who have our swords by our sides?” he replied.
This ranks as one of the more succinct expressions of the might equals right ethic that holds whoever has the power establishes matters of right and wrong.
Some have adopted this frame when analyzing the recent strike against Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian general who headed the Quds Force, the foreign operations branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
But Gregory Shaffer, an international law professor with UC Irvine Law School, said such a framing is going too far.
“It’s clearly a power-based system,” he said. “But there are legal norms and questions of legitimacy that states take seriously.”
Shaffer and many other pundits believe the Trump administration violated international law when it ordered the drone strike that resulted in the death of Soleimani.
“The rules of the U.N. Charter mandates all states to respect the sovereignty of other states,” Shaffer said. “That includes not assassinating foreign officials in a foreign country.”
While Trump and his allies are keen to avoid the word assassination and to draw parallels between the killing of Someimani and other drone strikes that resulted in the deaths of baleful actors in the Middle East — like Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki — the Soleimani killing is different.
“Soleimani was a state official of a sitting member of the U.N.,” Shaffer said. “This is different than al-Qaeda or ISIS, which are not part of the U.N. charter.”
It’s why several pundits are willing to deem the Soleimani killing an assassination, versus a legitimate strike as in the case when Trump ordered the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a leader of ISIS.
Agnes Callamard, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial summary or arbitrary executions, said the Trump administration’s maneuver qualifies as an illegal assassination because “outside the context of active hostilities, the use of drones or other means for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal.”
“To be justified under international human rights law, intentionally lethal or potentially lethal force can only be used where strictly necessary to protect against an imminent threat to life,” Callamard said.
The question of whether Soleimani posed an imminent threat to the United States is considered unlikely by Shaffer and other experts, but the president said Friday the general was prepared to attack four different American embassies throughout the Middle East.
While Trump’s comments are the latest in a shifting series of public explanations by the president and his allies, the American people have yet to see a formal legal justification for the killing.