Wired for War

It is doubtless hard for most Americans, and for most people who have not had extended experience of war, to fathom the experience, values, motives and emotions of a lethal and brutally effective military leader like Qassem Suleimani, head of Iran's Quds Force, profiled in this week's New Yorker by Dexter Filkins. The Quds force spearheads Iran's overseas military adventures, and Suleimani helped build up Hezbollah, choreographed and equipped Shiite militias' killings of Americans in Iraq, probably helped orchestrate Hezbollah's terrorist bombings of Jews in Argentina, and is directing Iran's military intervention on behalf of Assad in Syria. He cut his teeth in eight years of brutal combat in the Iran-Iraq war.

Filkins cites Ryan Crocker asserting that Suleimani is not motivated primarily by religion: "Religion doesn’t drive him. Nationalism drives him, and the love of the fight.”  But Suleimani has a certain mysticism of his own.  "When I see the children of the martyrs, I want to smell that scent, and I lose myself," he recently said in an interview in Iran. Stranger yet is his response to eight years of World War I-like horror in the Iran-Iraq war: