Tag Archives: Qassem Soleimani assassination

Pompeo: I Lied About Soleimani ‘Imminent Attacks’, by Daniel McAdams

Posted on January 11, 2020 | Leave a comment

Mike Pompeo seems genuinely proud of his lies. From Daniel McAdams at ronpaulinstitute.org:

Trump’s neoconservative Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, is a man unafraid to admit to being a liar. In fact he seems to revel in his ability to lie to the American people.

Remember just a week ago when Pompeo told us that the US absolutely HAD to send in a drone to assassinate Iran’s top general, Qassim Soleimani, while he was in Iraq on a peace mission because he was planning “imminent attacks” on US personnel and interests in the Middle East.

These claims were crafted to blunt any criticism of the blatantly illegal act of killing a top military officer of a country with which you are not at war in a third country (which forbade the attack on its soil) with which you are allied. Americans raising concerns about the murder of Soleimani were to be made to look unpatriotic if they objected: “you mean you WANT Americans die?

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Donald Trump has just blown up his goal of isolating Iran, by John R. Bradley

Posted on January 10, 2020 | Leave a comment

The response to the American assassination of Qassem Soleimani from the Sunni Arab nations is undoubtedly not what Trump and company had expected. From John R. Bradley at spectator.co.uk:

The unified Sunni Arab response to Soleimani’s killing is not what Washington envisaged

A blood-red flag was raised over the Jamkaran mosque in the Iranian holy city of Qom last week, one normally reserved to commemorate the death of martyrs. This time, it was intended as a call to arms. ‘We have unfurled this flag so that all [Shia] believers in the world gather around it to avenge Qassem Soleimani’s blood unjustly shed,’ said the mosque’s leader. In Tehran, there were calls for bloody retribution for the air strike that killed Iranian general Soleimani — and everywhere, talk of all-out war. If it was also intended to strike the fear of Allah into the hearts of Iran’s Sunni Arab enemies, it certainly succeeded.

In Riyadh, there was panic. The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, hastily sent an anti-war delegation to Washington and London. At home, his officials emphasised that the kingdom had not been consulted beforehand about the drone strike. ‘Please don’t blame us,’ was the message to Tehran. The Emirati foreign minister likewise called for restraint, warning of the devastating consequences for the Persian Gulf if war between the US and Iran were to break out.

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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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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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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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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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Fragmentation in the Axis of resistance led to Soleimani’s Death, by Elijah J. Magnier

Posted on January 7, 2020 | 1 comment

Yet another theory on the murder of Qassem Soleimani and its implications going forward. From Elijah J. Magnier at ejmagnier.com:

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It was not the US decision to fire missiles against the IRGC commander Brigadier General Qassem Soleimani that killed the Iranian officer and his companions in Baghdad. Yes, of course, the order that was given to launch missiles from the two drones (which destroyed the two cars carrying Sardar Soleimani and his companion the Iraqi commander in al-Hashd al-Shaabi Jamal Jaafar Al-Tamimi aka Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes and burned their bodies in the vehicle) came from US command and control. However, the reason President Donald Trump made this decision derives from the weakness of the “axis of resistance”, which has completely retreated from the level of performance that Iran believed it was capable of after decades of work to strengthen this “axis”.

A close companion of Major General Qassim Soleimani, to whom he spoke hours before boarding the plane that took him from Damascus to Baghdad, told me: “The nobleman died. Palestine above all has lost Hajj Qassem (Soleimani). He was the “King” of the Axis of the Resistance and its leader. He was assassinated and this is exactly what he was hoping to reach in this life (Martyrdom). However, this axis will live and will not die. No doubt, the Axis of the Resistance needs to review its policy and regenerate itself to correct its path. This was what Hajj Qassim was complaining about and planning to work on and strategizing about in his last hours. ”

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America Escalates Its “Democratic” Oil War in the Near East, by Michael Hudson

Posted on January 7, 2020 | Leave a comment

According to Michael Hudson, Soleimani was murdered because he would have been instrumental in Iraq’s quest to control its own oil. From Michael Hudson at counterpunch.org:

Photograph Source: http://www.dragonoil.com – CC BY-SA 3.0

The mainstream media are carefully sidestepping the method behind America’s seeming madness in assassinating Islamic Revolutionary Guard general Qassim Suleimani to start the New Year. The logic behind the assassination was a long-standing application of U.S. global policy, not just a personality quirk of Donald Trump’s impulsive action. His assassination of Iranian military leader Suleimani was indeed a unilateral act of war in violation of international law, but it was a logical step in a long-standing U.S. strategy. It was explicitly authorized by the Senate in the funding bill for the Pentagon that it passed last year.

The assassination was intended to escalate America’s presence in Iraq to keep control of the region’s oil reserves, and to back Saudi Arabia’s Wahabi troops (Isis, Al Quaeda in Iraq, Al Nusra and other divisions of what are actually America’s foreign legion) to support U.S. control of Near Eastern oil as a buttress of the U.S. dollar. That remains the key to understanding this policy, and why it is in the process of escalating, not dying down.

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