Many commentators, including legal experts, have condemned the assassination of the Iranian military commander General Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad airport last week. It was brutal, cold-blooded murder carried out on the orders of US President Donald Trump.

To kill a senior official of a foreign state in such a dastardly way is an act of war and a war crime.

More especially because it has since emerged that Soleimani was on a diplomatic peace mission when he arrived at the airport, according to Iraqi prime minister Adel Abdul Mahdi. The Iraqi leader says Soleimani was engaged in efforts to tamp down regional tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran. What’s more, the Americans knew of this peace overture and apparently encouraged it. Then they turned around and murdered Soleimani.

The subsequent character assassination of Soleimani by US officials – that he had blood on his hands of millions of civilians, that he was a terror chief, that his killing was a “pre-emptive defensive action” – is a disgusting effort to justify an unjustifiable act of murder carried out by the Americans.