As the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, Qassem Suleimani has for many years directed both Tehran’s own soldiers and its network of local militias throughout the Middle East. Michael Doran analyzes his blood-soaked career and the significance of his death at the hands of the American military:

Suleimani built Lebanese Hizballah into the powerful state within a state that we know today. A terrorist organization receiving its funds, arms, and marching orders from Tehran, Hizballah has a missile arsenal larger than that of most countries in the region. The group’s success has been astounding, helping to cement Iran’s influence not just in Lebanon but farther around the Arab world.

Building up on this successful experience, Suleimani spent the last decade replicating the Hizballah model in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, propping up local militias with precision weapons and tactical know-how. In Syria, his forces have allied with Russia to rescue the regime of Bashar al-Assad, a project that, in practice, has meant driving over 10 million people from their homes and killing well over half a million.

In Iraq . . . Suleimani’s militias ride roughshod over the legitimate state institutions. They rose to power, of course, after participating in an insurgency, of which he was the architect, against American and coalition forces. Hundreds of American soldiers lost their lives to the weapons that the Quds Force provided to its Iraqi proxies.

His departure will make Iran much weaker. It will embolden the country’s regional rivals—primarily Israel and Saudi Arabia—to pursue their strategic interests more resolutely. It will also instill in the protesters in Iran, Lebanon, and, especially, Iraq, the hope that they will one day wrest control of their governments from the talons of the Islamic Republic.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.