President Trump has spent much of his presidency maligning US intelligence agencies as corrupt and incompetent – often in open and notorious ways. But he has proven time and again that he is immune to charges of hypocrisy. Only that explains him citing intelligence gathered by those very agencies to justify this:
US President Donald Trump has said that he ordered a precision strike to ‘terminate’ a top Iranian commander [Qassem Soleimani] who was plotting ‘imminent and sinister attacks’ on Americans, adding that the decision was one of deterrence rather than aggression.
The move marks a major escalation in regional tensions that have pitted Tehran against Washington and its allies in the Middle East, raising the specter of further regional destabilization. The strike, condemned by Iran and its allies as an ‘assassination,’ has been met with concern by European officials and the United Nations, who have called for de-escalation.
(CNN, January 4, 2020)
But, if you believe this assassination had anything to do with foiling any imminent attack, you’re either a white evangelical or a willful fool (or both). Because here, courtesy of Friday’s edition of Morning Joe on MSNBC, is how Trump himself “projected” this attack on November 16, 2011:
[Obama] will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate.
He’s weak, and he’s ineffective. So I believe that he will attack Iran sometime prior to the election, because he thinks that’s the only way he can get elected … isn’t it pathetic.
In addition to being a pathological liar, Trump is a congenital confessor/projector. The latter is surpassed in its pathology only by his Orwellian doublespeak; you know, like saying he ordered this assassination to prevent a war, not to start one; or that Obama is to blame for all the mess he’s creating.
But projection compels him to continually attribute to others his faults, insecurities, shortcomings, and misdeeds. In other words, everything he said about Obama back then he knew would’ve been true about him if he were in Obama’s position.
Now he is. Indeed, his uncanny prescience is what makes this case of projection so perverse. Because even Trump could not have imagined he’d be living it out as he just did.
Except that he started this war with Iran not only to get (re)elected but also to fend off looming impeachment. And he couldn’t care less about the fallout. His amorality, narcissism, and recklessness are such that he has no compunction about triggering a war with Iran to protect his own hide. Intelligence that Iran is willing and able to execute deadly retaliation be damned.
Apropos of lies and intelligence, recall the warmongering, “fire-and-fury” rhetoric Trump hurled at North Korea. He crowed that it forced President Kim Jong-un to agree to a summit, which he then tweeted about as follows:
Just landed — a long trip, but everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office.
There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea. … President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. No longer – sleep well tonight!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2018
But that was a big lie. Because, far from agreeing to denuclearize, North Korea proceeded to increase its nuclear arsenal, making it far more dangerous today than the day Trump took office. Given this, any intelligent person would be loath to play with fire again. But Trump is a blustering blowhard who just does what blustering blowhards do:
Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2020
His predecessors Bush and Obama were intelligent enough to reject patently disingenuous overtures from North Korea to denuclearize. They were also intelligent enough to reject this military option to assassinate Soleimani. Trump was not – in either case.
Meanwhile, he has pleaded continually that it’s un-American to impeach a president while the country is enjoying economic growth. So just imagine his self-serving pleadings if the country were waging existential war.
Never mind that Trump’s own words would damn him even in this context. Because here is how he vented incredulity at Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to impeach George W. Bush:
He got us into the war with lies, and I mean, look at the trouble Bill Clinton got into with something that was totally unimportant and they tried to impeach him, which was nonsense.
(CNN, October 15, 2008)
That said, it might be helpful to know that Soleimani embodied for Iran what General Colin Powell (as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) embodied for the United States, as well as what Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (as self-appointed Caliph) embodied to ISIS.
All the same, you should ignore politicians and pundits pontificating about this assassination as if Soleimani were the most bedeviling and menacing creature to ever walk the face of the earth. After all, these are the same people who were pontificating about the assassination of Osama bin Laden as such … until they began pontificating about al–Baghdadi as such. And they are the same people who will soon be pontificating about Soleimani’s matryoshka-like successor as such.
Moreover, despite their scaremongering about the myriad ways Iran will exact revenge, trust me, it will do no more than it has done for years with impunity. In fact, the United States spent much of the past 20 years blaming Iran for, among other things,
- waging proxy war that killed hundreds and maimed thousands of US soldiers in Iraq;
- inciting Jihadi insurrections throughout the Middle East;
- sending Jihadis to execute terrorist attacks in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and even the United States; and
- endangering commercial tankers with torpedoes and attacking oil fields with drones.
But, to avenge this assassination, Iran would be wise to limit retaliation as much as practicable to Trump personally. For example, it could make a show of warning that it would not be safe for anyone to continue living in or frequenting any Trump hotel, condo, or golf course. That would hurt him more financially than anything even he would dare do to Iran.
Besides, nothing betrays how fleeting this assassination of Soleimani is likely to be quite like reports about these four clear and present dangers:
- Taliban fighters are resurgent in Afghanistan.
- ISIS fighters are resurgent in Syria.
- Iraqi citizens are storming the US embassy in Baghdad, attempting to emulate the infamous way Iranian citizens stormed the US embassy in Tehran in 1979.
- Iranian forces are now bound to escalate the asymmetric warfare they’ve been waging ever since George W. Bush declared Iran part of the “axis of evil” (along with Iraq and North Korea) in 2002.
These are only some of the reasons the United States has so little to show for the thousands dead and trillions spent since 9/11, trying in vain to build democracies in the Middle East. Yet Trump, who pledged to end this march of folly, is now marching more troops to add to it.
Alas, this latest deployment will only provide more sitting ducks for Iran’s Jihadi proxies to target. And it’s only a matter of time before they force surviving US troops to retreat from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria the way they infamously retreated from Lebanon in 1984.
All of the above explains why the assassination of Soleimani amounts to nothing more than another pyrrhic victory in America’s unwinnable and never-ending war against Islamic terrorism.
Ominously, the following from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo betrays how far America has lost its way:
I spent the last day and a half, two days, talking to partners in the region [notably Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE] … they’ve all been fantastic. And then talking to our partners in other places [notably France, Germany, and the UK,] that haven’t been quite as good.
(Euronews, January 5, 2020)
Imagine a world in which, instead of all NATO countries, America’s only reliable allies are those in Trump’s coalition of convenience, namely Israel and a few Arab dictatorships. Because that’s the untenable place Trump is (mis)leading it to, geopolitically and geostrategically.
Which compels me to end with this from “Netanyahu’s Bombshell Presentation on Iran Bombs,” May 2, 2018:
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Netanyahu betrayed no hint of humility or regret when he addressed the UN General Assembly in 2012, or when he addressed a joint session of the US Congress in 2015. On both occasions, his patented intent was to goad President Barack Obama into invading Iran the way he goaded Bush into invading Iraq. …
But Netanyahu finally has in Trump a US president all too willing to be goaded, provided it’s done with a slobbering dose of flattery. No doubt this is what motivated Netanyahu to mint Temple coins hailing Trump as the second coming of Emperor Cyrus the Great. …
Sure enough, Trump is the only leader among the p5+1 signatories to the Iran nuclear deal who found Netanyahu’s presentation [about Iran being an imminent nuclear threat] credible. That is to say the leaders of China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom plus Germany all dismissed it as just another one of his reckless political stunts.
To be fair, Netanyahu couldn’t care less about those p4+1. Because he clearly formatted and orchestrated his PowerPoint presentation to provide Trump, the p1 leader, a colorable pretext to “rip up the deal.”
Trump wasted no time signaling to Netanyahu ‘mission accomplished.’ This, despite Trump’s own CIA director, secretary of state, and secretary of defense all conceding that he has no legal justification to rip up the deal.
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This is why nobody in America or the Middle East is happier today than Netanyahu. Not to mention the bonus fact that, in triggering war with Iran, Trump has also provided a wag-the-dog diversion from Netanyahu’s own pending impeachment for fraud, bribery, and breach of trust. Birds of a feather …
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