1. Initially I was on the fence, but the more I consider different scenarios, the more the original alarmist takes seem even more wrong than I first suspected. The WW3 stuff is obviously silly, but even the risk of "mere" war seems increasingly unlikely
2. Of course, this doesn't mean killing Soleimani was good or right. But the evidence that this will lead to significant escalation seems lacking. Iran will likely escalate and retaliate in some way, but that's not the same as war. Moreover, Iran has *already* been escalating
3. Some of the discourse around Trump bringing us to war has been myopic and ahistorical. Assad and Iran have been waging war on Syrians for quite some time. The war, in short, has already been happening—and it has cost half a million Syrians their lives. Let's not forget that
4. What's striking to me is that Middle East experts, including (importantly) those from the region, have tended to be *less* alarmist. There's probably a good reason for this—they're less fixated on Trump and less likely to be US-centric in their analysis
5. It seems fair to assume that one's view of Trump will have some not insignificant impact on how they interpret the fallout from Soleimani's killing. There's nothing wrong with this per se and there's no way to correct for it, but we should at least be aware of that
6. The left is in a bind, and there's a tension between two impulses. There's anti-imperialism and a (justified) skepticism toward US military action. Then there's a longstanding left tradition of solidarity with the victims of repression and with populations rather than regimes
7. Too much of the analysis on the left seems to have erred on the side of anti-imperialist critique with insufficient attention to what Iran has actually already been doing—at tremendous human cost to Syrians and to civilian populations in the region more generally
8. The 2000s, in part because of the Iraq war and the Bush administration's appropriation of democracy promotion, much of the left has become even more uncomfortable than it already was with US "leadership" in the Middle East. This is where the US centrism becomes a problem
9. Not everything is about us. And not everything is primarily a question of whether the US is, or isn't, using military force. Not everything is about repeating Iraq. Context matters, and understanding what's actually going on in the Middle East matters
10. The Bush administration used to talk about "moral clarity." The left should be more concerned with *moral consistency,* but our obsession with America's original sin and sometimes even its supposedly inherent badness distorts our not only analysis but our moral assessments
11. There's no moral equivalence between the US & Iran. The US has done terrible things in the Middle East. That's clear. But to suggest that we're at the rarified level of the deliberate and systematic mass murder that Soleimani helped orchestrate isn't just wrong; it's silly
