Tag Archives: Iran

Full-Scale War Avoided & Trump Goes Right Back to Warmongering, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on January 10, 2020 | Leave a comment

The only consistency to President Trump’s negotiating style is his inconsistency; he’s a one man good cop-bad cop show. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

The United States and Iran entered into a direct military exchange for the first time ever with the drone assassination of General Qassem Soleimani last week and a retaliatory strike from Iran via surface-to-surface missiles upon two US military bases on Wednesday.

As usual it was the less powerful nation who exercised restraint, with Iran skillfully targeting the bases’ military capabilities but taking measures to successfully avoid any casualties. The two nations de-escalated back down to their previous high level of dangerous hostilities with an understanding between them that neither side wants a full-scale war. Both sides played “chicken” and both sides swerved, and they know that about each other now.

So that was a relief. We were all forced to hold our breath and hope against hope that cooler heads would prevail after the senseless assassination of a sovereign nation’s top military official, and they did. A full-scale war that would have dwarfed Iraq and Vietnam in terms of death, destruction and destabilization was averted.

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After Missiles Fly, Iraq Becomes the Battleground, by Tom Luongo

Posted on January 9, 2020 | Leave a comment

Tom Luongo is in desperate need of a copy editor. As a writer who not always correctly edits my own stuff, I sympathize. But whatever his writing miscues, he always has a unique and provocative viewpoint. From Luongo at tomluongo.me:

he future of the U.S.’s involvement in the Middle East is in Iraq. The exchange of hostilities between the U.S. and Iran occurred wholly on Iraqi soil and it has become the site on which that war will continue.

Israel continues to up the ante on Iran, following President Trump’s lead by bombing Shia militias stationed near the Al Bukumai border crossing between Syria and Iraq.

The U.S. and Israel are determined this border crossing remains closed and have demonstrated just how far they are willing to go to prevent the free flow of goods and people across this border.

The regional allies of Iran are to be kept weak, divided and constantly under harassment.

Iraq is the battleground because the U.S. lost in Syria. Despite the presence of U.S. troops squatting on Syrian oil fields in Deir Ezzor province or the troops sitting in the desert protecting the Syrian border with Jordan, the Russians, Hezbollah and the Iranian Quds forces continue to reclaim territory previously lost to the Syrian government.

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The War Pigs Are Finally Revealing Themselves – And This Is Just The Beginning… by Brandon Smith

Posted on January 9, 2020 | 2 comments

If the globalists have their way, a ramped-up war in the Middle East is on tap. From Brandon Smith at alt-market.com:

In 2016 during the election campaign of Donald Trump one of the primary factors of his popularity among conservatives was that he was one of the first candidates since Ron Paul to argue for bringing US troops home and ending American involvement in the various elitist fabricated wars in the Middle East. From Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Syria and Yemen and beyond, the Neo-Cons and Neo-Libs at the behest of their globalist masters had been waging war oversees unabated for over 15 years. The time was ripe for a change and people felt certain that if Hillary Clinton entered the White House, another 4-8 years of war were guaranteed.

There was nothing to be gained from these wars. They were only dragging the US down socially and economically, and even the idea of “getting the oil” had turned into a farce as the majority of Iraqi oil has been going to China, not the US. General estimates on the costs of the wars stand at $5 trillion US tax dollars and over 4500 American dead along with around 40,000 wounded. The only people that were benefiting from the situation were globalists and banking elites, who had been clamoring to destabilize the Middle East since the day they launched their “Project For A New American Century” (PNAC). Truly, all wars are banker wars.

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Trump Hints NATO Should Take US Place in Middle East; Lies About Iran and Slaps on More Humiliating Sanctions, by Joe Lauria

Posted on January 9, 2020 | Leave a comment

The assassination of Qassem Soleimani was apiece with US policy in the Middle East—based on lies and unlikely to produce either its stated or sub rosa aims. From Joe Lauria at consortiumnews.com:

UPDATED: Trump will not escalate the crisis with Iran but talked tough, while inviting NATO to take over at least part of U.S. role in the region.

Following Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes on two US military bases in Iraq on Wednesday, President Donald Trump imposed unspecified new sanctions on Iran but told Tehran that the US is “ready to embrace peace for all who seek it.”

In a televised address from the White House on Wednesday, Trump did not say the U.S. would further escalate military action against Iran following Iran’s ballistic missile strikes, which the Iranian foreign minister said concluded Iran’s response to the U.S. killing of Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the leader of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Trump reported that there were no deaths or injuries and minimal property damage from the Iranian missile strikes over night. “Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world,” Trump said.

Iran’s accurate missile attack demonstrated its capabilities, without causing damage that would have tempted Trump to further respond.  Cooler heads prevailed on both sides of the conflict, with the prospect of a disastrous major war that would put millions of lives and the world economy at risk staring them both in the face.

While the Iranian response may not have satisfied an Iranian population enraged over the murder of a revered military leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the ultimate revenge would be the expulsion of U.S. troops from the Middle East.

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The Deeper Story Behind the Assassination of Soleimani, by Federico Pieraccini

Posted on January 9, 2020 | 1 comment

Iraq’s prime minister is telling an entirely different story about Qassem’s assassination than the one Trump, Pompeo, and the US news media are telling. From Federico Pieraccini at strategic-culture.org:

Days after the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, new and important information is coming to light from a speech given by the Iraqi prime minister. The story behind Soleimani’s assassination seems to go much deeper than what has thus far been reported, involving Saudi Arabia and China as well the U.S. dollar’s role as the global reserve currency.

The Iraqi prime minister, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, has revealed details of his interactions with Trump in the weeks leading up to Soleimani’s assassination in a speech to the Iraqi parliament. He tried to explain several times on live television how Washington had been browbeating him and other Iraqi members of parliament to toe the American line, even threatening to engage in false-flag sniper shootings of both protesters and security personnel in order to inflame the situation, recalling similar modi operandi seen in Cairo in 2009, Libya in 2011, and Maidan in 2014. The purpose of such cynicism was to throw Iraq into chaos.

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Come Home, America: Stop Policing the Globe and Put an End to Wars-Without-End, by John W. Whitehead

Posted on January 9, 2020 | Leave a comment

America’s global interventionism is destroying America and wreaking horrific damage in places like the Middle East. From John W. Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“Let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad. This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation. America must be restored to a proper role in the world. But we can do that only through the recovery of confidence in ourselves…. together we will call America home to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning. From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America. From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America.”—George S. McGovern, former Senator and presidential candidate

I agree wholeheartedly with George S. McGovern, a former Senator and presidential candidate who opposed the Vietnam War, about one thing: I’m sick of old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

It’s time to bring our troops home.

Bring them home from Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Bring them home from Germany, South Korea and Japan. Bring them home from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. Bring them home from Niger, Chad and Mali. Bring them home from Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Cronyism, Debt, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Imperialism, Military, War

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Another Crisis in the Middle East – When Will We Ever Learn? by Boyd Cathey

Posted on January 9, 2020 | Leave a comment

If there’s no further escalation by Iran or the US of hostilities, there may be an opportunity for the US to negotiate with Iran and start withdrawing from the Middle East. From Boyd Cathey at boydcatheyreviewofbooks.com:

Friends,

Qasem Soleimani is dead, his life snuffed out by missiles shot from American drones which targeted his convoy near Bagdad International Airport. By all accounts this man, in many ways the second most important figure in Iran, was the mastermind of numerous violent actions—we call them “terrorist” acts—throughout the Middle East, and very likely was indirectly (maybe directly) responsible for the deaths of dozens of Americans in the region, at least if we can believe our discredited intelligence agencies (it’s ironic that most of those who rightly indict these agencies for their anti-constitutional attempts to “take out” President Trump, now enthusiastically embrace the assessments of those very same agencies when it comes to Iran).

And now the Iranians have reacted directly by firing ground-to-ground missiles aimed at Iraqi army bases; from reports no Americans, military or civilian, were killed or injured in these attacks. That may or may not indicate a particular strategic calculation on the part of the Iranians. Indeed, if this should be the only major response to Soleimani’s death it may—underline “may”—indicate an implicit desire to lower the level of high stakes hostilities…and a realization that the United States under President Trump is unlike previous American administrations. After all, Soleimani was arguably the most powerful and most significant military leader in Iran; the Iranians, given his death, had to react. As our leaders recognized, that was certain, and the attacks by the Iranians did not come as a surprise.

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The Donald’s Assassination of General Soleimani – As Stupid as It Gets, by David Stockman

Posted on January 9, 2020 | Leave a comment

Soleimani’s assassination does nothing to increase the safety of Americans back home and will just get the US more deeply involved in the Middle Eastern morass. From David Stockman at davidstockmanscontracorner.com via lewrockewell.com:

During more than a half-century of Washington watching we have seen stupidity rise from one height to yet another. But nothing – just plain nothing – compares to the the blithering stupidity of the Donald’s Iran “policy”, culminating in the mindless assassination of its top military leader and hero of the so-called Islamic Revolution, Major General Qassem Soleimani.

To be sure, we don’t give a flying f*ck about the dead man himself. Like most generals of whatever army (including the US army), he was a cold-blooded, professional killer.

And in this day and age of urban and irregular warfare and drone-based annihilation delivered by remote joystick, generals tend to kill more civilians than combatants. The dead civilian victims in their millions of U.S. generals reaching back to the 1960s surely attest to that.

Then again, even the outright belligerents Soleimani did battle with over the decades were not exactly alms-bearing devotees of Mother Theresa, either. In sequential order, they were the lethally armed combatants mustered by Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush, the Sunni jihadists of ISIS and the Israeli and Saudi air forces, which at this very moment are raining high tech bombs and missiles on Iranian allies and proxies in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.

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If Baghdad Wants Us Out, Let’s Go! by Patrick Buchanan

Posted on January 7, 2020 | Leave a comment

If the US government did as Patrick Buchanan advises in the title, it would be its smartest foreign policy move since World War II. From Buchanan at buchanan.org:

Fifteen years after the U.S. invaded Iraq to turn Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship into a beacon of democracy, Iraq’s Parliament, amid shouts of “Death to America!” voted to expel all U.S. troops from the country.

Though nonbinding, the expulsion vote came after mobs trashed the U.S. embassy in an assault that recalled Tehran 1979.

What provoked Iraq’s Parliament into demanding the ouster of all U.S. troops?

First, the five December U.S. strikes on Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces in retaliation for a dozen Kataib Hezbollah rocket attacks on U.S. bases, which killed a contractor and wounded four U.S. soldiers.

Then came President Donald Trump’s decision to launch a drone-strike and kill Iranian General Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport. Killed in the same strike was the Shiite Iraqi leader of Kataib Hezbollah.

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Another Stupid War, by Michael Blitzkrieg

Posted on January 7, 2020 | Leave a comment

The upside of the Iran situation is that it will hasten the demise of the American empire. From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

All I wanted to do this week was work on part 2 of my localism series, but circumstances quickly got the best of me. The assassination of Iran’s top general Qassem Soleimani was an event of such historical significance, I feel obligated to detail my thoughts on what it means and how things unfold from here, especially given how much of a role geopolitics and questions of empire have played in my writings.

First off, we need to understand the U.S. is now at war with Iran. It’s an undeclared, insane and unconstitutional war, but it is war nonetheless. There is no world in which one government intentionally assassinates the top general of another government and that not be warfare. You can argue the U.S. and Iran were already engaged in low-level proxy wars, and that’s a fair assessment, but you can’t say we aren’t currently in a far more serious a state of war. We are.

Soleimani was not only a powerful general, he was a popular figurewithin Iran. Unlike other blows the U.S. and Iran have inflicted upon one another, this cannot be walked back. There’s no deescalation from here, only escalation. Even if you want to pretend this didn’t happen and turn back the clock, it’s impossible. This is a major event of historical proportions and should be seen as such. Everything has been turned up a notch.

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