Breaking, Trump ordered US military attack that killed shadowy Iranian general in Baghdad, Pentagon confirms

[kirtland r.m.]

https://www.foxnews.com/world/rockets-b ... s-reported Another meets a fitting end!

[ajax]

The neocons win

[nightlight]

World War I began in 1914 after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and lasted until 1918. During the conflict, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire (the Central Powers) fought against Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Japan and the United States (the Allied Powers).

[tmac]

As with WWI, there are many who might underestimate where this could go, and what the consequences could be. But it's about time . . . . to quit just coasting along toward full-fledged socialism. It's probably about time for a serious shake-up.

[Robin Hood]

It's difficult to see anything other than trouble as a result of this.

[Lexew1899]

The Neville Chamberlain's and death to America crowd is protesting loudly about this on Twitter. If they are angry it's usually a good thing.

[ajax]

Metallica sums it up nicely:

[lundbaek]

"The Congress shall have the Power....to declare War,...." Has the U.S. Congress exercised that responsibility?

[DesertWonderer2]

Meh...it will be forgotten in a couple weeks.

[ajax]

U.S. Will Come To Regret Its Assassination of Qassim Soleimani

[Lord of my dogs]

Check this out from zerohedge

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/nyt ... rs-killing

Hours before a US strike at Baghdad's International Airport killed Iran's top military leader, Qasem Soleimani, former Obama National Security Council (NSC) official Steven Simon posited in a New York Times Op-Ed that Soleimani could be assassinated using a hypersonic missile while visiting Baghdad.



[H]ypersonics are a weaponized moral hazard for states with a taste for intervention, because they erase barriers to picking fights. Is an adversary building something that might be a weapons factory? Is there an individual in an unfriendly country who cannot be apprehended? What if the former commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Qassem Soleimani, visits Baghdad for a meeting and you know the address? The temptations to use hypersonic missiles will be many.

Oddly, he describes Soleimani as the "former commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards," when he was in fact in charge of the Guards' Quds Force until his death.

The Times tweeted the article at 1:38 p.m. EST, several hours before the strike.

While US officials told Reuters that a drone - not a hypersonic weapon - took out Soleimani, it's incredibly curious that Simon, Obama's former senior director for the Middle East and North Africa on the National Security Council, wrote of his assassination literally hours before it happened, where he suggested it might happen.

According to his bio, Simon is an adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), as well as an adjunct professor of security studies at Georgetown University.

He was also a Goldman Sachs visiting professor of policy at Princeton University, as well as the deputy director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and a senior analyst at the RAND corporation.

Interestingly, in 2017 RAND tweeted "Study: Hypersonic missiles are a game changer," the exact same headline as Simon's NYT Op-Ed.

[ajax]

[ajax]

[ajax]

The Soleimani Assassination: The Long-Awaited Beginning of The End of America’s Imperial Ambitions
https://ahtribune.com/world/north-afric ... tions.html

BY PHILIP GIRALDI

The United States is now at war with Iran in a conflict that could easily have been avoided and it will not end well. There will be no declaration of war coming from either side, but the assassination of Iranian Quds Force Commander General Qassem Soleimani and the head of Kata’ib Hezbollah Abu Mehdi Muhandis by virtue of a Reaper drone strike in Baghdad will shift the long-simmering conflict between the two nations into high gear. Iran cannot let the killing of a senior military officer go unanswered even though it cannot directly confront the United States militarily. But there will be reprisals and Tehran’s suspected use of proxies to stage limited strikes will now be replaced by more damaging actions that can be directly attributed to the Iranian government. As Iran has significant resources locally, one can expect that the entire Persian Gulf region will be destabilized.

And there is also the terrorism card, which will come into play. Iran has an extensive diaspora throughout much of the Middle East and, as it has been threatened by Washington for many years, it has had a long time to prepare for a war to be fought largely in the shadows. No American diplomat, soldier or even tourists in the region should consider him or herself to be safe, quite the contrary. It will be an “open season” on Americans. The U.S. has already ordered a partial evacuation of the Baghdad Embassy and has advised all American citizens to leave the country immediately.

Donald Trump rode to victory in 2016 on a promise to end the useless wars in the Middle East, but he has now demonstrated very clearly that he is a liar. Instead of seeking detente, one of his first actions was to end the JCPOA nuclear agreement and re-introduce sanctions against Iran. In a sense, Iran has from the beginning been the exception to Trump’s no-new-war pledge, a position that might reasonably be directly attributed to his incestuous relationship with the American Jewish community and in particular derived from his pandering to the expressed needs of Israel’s belligerent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump bears full responsibility for what comes next. The neoconservatives and Israelis are predictably cheering the result, with Mark Dubowitz of the pro-Israel Foundation for Defense of Democracies enthusing that it is “bigger than bin Laden…a massive blow to the [Iranian] regime.” Dubowitz, whose credentials as an “Iran expert” are dubious at best, is at least somewhat right in this case. Qassem Suleimani is, to be sure, charismatic and also very popular in Iran. He is Iran’s most powerful military figure in the entire region, being the principal contact for proxies and allies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. But what Dubowitz does not understand is that no one in a military hierarchy is irreplaceable. Suleimani’s aides and high officials in the intelligence ministry are certainly more than capable of picking up his mantle and continuing his policies.

In reality, the series of foolish attacks initiated by the United States over the past week will only hasten the departure of much of the U.S. military from the region. The Pentagon and White House have been insisting that Iran was behind an alleged Kata’ib Hezbollah attack on a U.S. installation that then triggered a strike by Washington on claimed militia targets in Syria and also inside Iraq. Even though the U.S. military presence is as a guest of the Iraqi government, Washington went ahead with its attack even after the Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi said “no.”

To justify its actions, Mark Esper, Secretary of Defense, went so far as to insist that “Iran is at war with the whole world,” a clear demonstration of just how ignorant the White House team actually is. The U.S. government characteristically has not provided any evidence demonstrating either Iranian or Kata’ib involvement in recent developments, but after the counter-strike killed 26 Iraqi soldiers, the mass demonstrations against the Embassy in Baghdad became inevitable. The demonstrations were also attributed to Iran by Washington even though the people in the street were undoubtedly Iraqis.

Now that the U.S. has also killed Suleimani and Muhandis in a drone strike at Baghdad Airport, clearly accomplished without the approval of the Iraqi government, it is inevitable that the prime minister will ask American forces to leave. That will in turn make the situation for the remaining U.S. troops in neighboring Syria untenable. And it will also force other Arab states in the region to rethink their hosting of U.S. soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen due to the law of unanticipated consequences as it is now clear that Washington has foolishly begun a war that serves no one’s interests.

The blood of the Americans, Iranians and Iraqis who will die in the next few weeks is clearly on Donald Trump’s hands as this war was never inevitable and served no U.S. national interest. It will surely turn out to be a debacle, as well as devastating for all parties involved. And it might well, on top of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, be the long-awaited beginning of the end of America’s imperial ambitions. Let us hope so!

---------------------------------------------

Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests.

[JohnnyL]

Check this out from zerohedge

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/nyt ... rs-killing

Hours before a US strike at Baghdad's International Airport killed Iran's top military leader, Qasem Soleimani, former Obama National Security Council (NSC) official Steven Simon posited in a New York Times Op-Ed that Soleimani could be assassinated using a hypersonic missile while visiting Baghdad.

Reminds me of that movie... The Sum of All Fears.

[lundbaek]

Iran in proving to be a stumbling block to the NWO.

[ajax]

How The Donald Assassinated 'America First'
https://www.targetliberty.com/2020/01/h ... first.html

By David Stockman

By the twisted logic of Imperial Washington, you could say the Iranians were asking for
it. After all, they had the nerve to locate their country right in the middle of 35 U.S.
military bases!

Then again, your saner angels may ask: What in the hell is Washington doing with a
massive military footprint in a region and in a string of backwater countries that have
virtually no bearing on homeland security, safety and liberty?

Djibouti? Oman? Kyrgyzstan? Uzbekistan? Afghanistan? Bahrain? Kuwait? And, yes,
Iraq and Iran?

n fact, Washington destroyed the former for no good reason and based on egregious Big
Lies about Saddam's nonexistent WMDs and sheltering of al-Qaeda. That turned Iraq
into a failed state hell-hole, pulsating with sectarian frictions and anti-American grievances--even as the rump of Iraq centered in Baghdad fell under the control of Iran-friendly Shiite politicians and militias.

At the same time, Iran itself is zero threat to the American homeland. It's tiny $350
billion GDP amounts to 6 days of US annual output and its $20 billion defense budget is
equivalent to what the Pentagon wastes every 10 days.

Militarily, it has no blue water navy, an air force that could double as a cold war
museum and a short and medium range missile force that is self-evidently dedicated to
defense and deterrence in the region, not an attack on the USA way over on the yonder
side of the deep blue seas.

Its 300 or so active aircraft, for example, include 175 US F-4, F-5, F-14 and sundry
transports, helicopters and trainers purchased by the Shah during the 1970s
and kept together since the revolution with bailing wire and bubble gum. It also
fields 60 or so Soviet vintage MiG-29s and Sukhoi Su attack aircraft---plus a few dozen
European and Chinese planes of mostly ancient design.

Likewise, even its most advanced medium range cruise missile (Soumar) can barely get
to Rome, Italy, to say nothing of Rome, Georgia.

As is evident from the yellow, green, red and black circles on the map below, which
circles outline each missile's striking range, the overwhelming bulk of Iran's missile
force has a range of 500 miles or less. These missiles are capable of hitting targets in the
immediate vicinity of the Persian Gulf, or roughly the same area which encompasses the
35 military bases designated by American flags in the graphic above.

Stated differently, Iran's extremely modest military capacities are not remotely about an
offensive threat to the American homeland. They are overwhelmingly about defending
itself in its own neighborhood, where Washington has been intervening and occupying
with massive firepower and hostile intent for decades.

Therein, of course, lies a hint. More than 13 years after Saddam's last hurrah on a
Baghdad gallows, the US still has upwards of 30,000 troops and contractors in the
immediate vicinity of the Persian Gulf. But why?

It can't be owing to ISIS. The Islamic State was never much more than a no count salient
of dusty, woebegone towns and villages on the Upper Euphrates straddling Western Iraq
and northeastern Syria, and was destined to collapse into its own barbaric madness
anyway. As it has happened, it was essentially dispatched by the Russian air force,
Assad's military and the Shiite militia forces organized by the dead man himself, Major
General Soleimani.

Likewise, it should be obvious by now that it's not about the oil, either. At the moment
the US is producing nearly 13 million barrels per day and is the world's leading oil
producer--well ahead of Saudi Arabia and Russia; and is now actually a net exporter of
crude for the first time in three-quarters of a century.

Besides, the Fifth Fleet has never been the solution to oil security. The cure for high
prices is high prices---as the great US shale oil and Canadian heavy oil booms so
cogently demonstrate, among others.

And the route to global oil industry stability is peaceful commerce because virtually
every regime--regardless of politics and ideology---needs all the oil revenue it can
muster to fund its own rule and keep its population reasonably pacified.

Surely, there is no better case for the latter than that of Iran itself---with an economy
burdened by decades of war, sanctions and mis-rule and an 80-million population that
aspires to a western standard of living.

So left to its own devices, Tehran would produce 5 million barrels per day from its
abundant reserves. That's more than 10 times its present meager exports, which have
nearly vanished owing to Washington's vicious sanctions against any and all customers
for its oil and potential investors in modernizing and expanding it production capacity.
So if it's not ISIS or oil, exactly why does Washington maintain the circle of 35 bases
displayed in the graphic above and keep thousands of US troops and other personnel in
harms' way in the region?

Or more to the moment, why has the Donald been unable to bring the forces home as he
has so often proclaimed to be his policy?

The answer, of course, is that the foreign policy apparatus of the US government is
controlled by anti-Iran neocons and regime changers. We are still in Syria not to fight
ISIS, which is gone, but to block Iran's land route to its allies in Syria and Lebanon
(Hezbollah); and we remain in Iraq solely to use it as a base for clandestine US and
Israeli attacks on these Iranian allies and proxy forces.

These Washington instigated or conducted attacks on Iranian allies, in fact, are why
there was growing pressure in the Iraqi government to demand that the US finally leave.

These pressures will now become overwhelming in light of this week's US bombing
of five PMF camps (Popular Mobilization Forces) which are Shiite militias that have
been integrated into the Iraqi army and which are under the command of its prime
minister. Thursday night's assassination of its Deputy Commander along with Soleimani is
only more kerosene on the fire.

To be sure, Iran's choice of allies has nothing to do with America's homeland security:
None of the sovereign governments of Lebanon (where Hezbollah is the leading political
party) or Syria or even Iraq (which is an ostensible US ally) have protested these
confession (i.e. Shiite) based arrangements and the aid and benefits which flow from
them.

That's because the so-called evil Shiite crescent is a bogeyman invented by Bibi
Netanyahu and is the excuse for his hysterical anti-Iranian foreign policy. The latter is
not even designed to enhance Israel's own security, but to vilify a "far enemy" that can
keep his rightwing coalition glued together and himself in power.

Likewise, the US military-industrial complex's greed and appetite for power and pelf is
so voracious that it will embrace any and all missions anywhere on the planet---no
matter how stupid or futile or immoral, as per the case of 19-years in Afghanistan---that
keep the budgetary loot flowing.

Accordingly, the Washington apparatus conspires to keep the 35 mideast bases in place
and to trigger actions like last night's insane assassination of Iran's foremost military
leader in order to reify the threat and to periodically stoke tensions and counter-attacks
that keep missions alive and the forces deployed.

Indeed, we are hard-pressed to imagine a more poignant case of the pot calling the
kettle black than Washington's claim that it had to retaliate owing to actual and
expected Iranian "aggression".

For crying out loud, Washington has been demonizing, ostracizing and economically
attacking Iran for decades, and is now literally attempting to destroy its economy and
society through its oil sanctions and its "maximum pressure" campaign that aims to
bring the fate of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi to its top leaders in Tehran.
So do ya think a regime under a veritable existential threat might gravitate toward
retaliation as an alternative to extinction?

And we need be clear about the matter of striking back in self defense. Washington's
current sanctions campaign against Iran is so aggressive and brutal that it constitutes
war by any other name.

When you surround a sovereign nation with an armada of land, sea and air-based high-
tech lethality and then declare outright economic war on it with a barely-disguised aim
of regime change, it must and will fight back however it can.

That's why Secretary of State Pompeo' statement justifying the Donald's act of naked
aggression is so hideous.

Washington is putting the entire nation of Iran at risk in the very place where God or
evolution, as the case may be, formed the peninsula on which it resides; and it is doing
so without any Iranian provocation against the security of the American homeland
whatsoever.

But this neocon knucklehead has the gall to insist that when it comes to the actual anti-
Iranian belligerents (i.e. U.S. forces) Washington has bivouacked where they have no business being at all, that not a hair on their head should come to harm.

That's Imperial arrogance of a kind rarely seen in a world history which is littered with
exactly that.

"I can't talk too much about the nature of the threats. But the American people
should know that the President's decision to remove Soleimani from the
battlefield saved American lives," Pompeo told CNN.

The IRGC general had been "actively plotting" in the region to "take big
action, as he described it, that would have put hundreds of lives at risk,"
according to Pompeo.

Undoubtedly, things will now spiral out of control because the Iranian regime must and
will retaliate for Soleimani's death. Indeed, by vaporizing the latter, the Donald has now
also vaporized any chance of actually implementing the "America First" policy upon
which he ran, and which was the principal basis for his freakish elevation to the Oval
Office.

The fact is, the only decent thing Obama did on the foreign policy front was the Iran
Nuke Deal. Under the latter, Iran gave up a nuclear weapons capability it never had or
wanted for the return of billions of escrowed dollars (which belong to Tehran in the first
place), while putting itself in a straight-jacket of international inspections and controls
that even Houdini could not have broken free from.

But the Donald wantonly $#!%-canned this arrangement, not because Iran violated either
the letter or spirit of the deal, but because the neocons--led by his bubble-headed son-
in-law and Bibi Netanyahu errand boy, Jared Kushner----blatantly lied to him about its alleged defects.

Indeed, the resulting Washington pivot to the current "maximum pressure" aggression
against Iran is fast becoming the Empire's most demented and shameful hour---even as it crystalizes like rarely before the difference between homeland defense and imperial
aggression.

Under the former, not one American serviceman, contractor or civilian official would be
in harms' way because the ring of hostile bases surrounding Iran would not exist nor
would Washington be waging economic warfare on what would otherwise be a
prosperous 5 million barrel per day oil trade with the world.

Only empires put their citizens needlessly in harms' way and thereby trap their leaders
into a cycle of violence which feeds upon itself.

The Donald is now yet another American president ensnared in the kind of tit-for-tat
trap that is the modus operandi of Empire First.

[ajax]

Iran Raises Flag That Signals Severe Battle to Come
https://www.targetliberty.com/2020/01/i ... evere.html

https://twitter.com/SiffatZahra/status/ ... 7107888128

[ajax]

Trump has made a martyr of Soleimani. A hero. Trump has done more for recruitment than anyone.

This is a Hydra. You cut one head off and three more appear.

He says the Iraq war was a disaster, Middle East meddling a disaster, yet he does this.

The swamp (military industrial complex, deep state, Federal Reserve) is as healthy as ever my friends.

Puppets in, puppets out.

[inho]

Trump has made a martyr of Soleimani. A hero.

For sure. He was known as a hero already when living: he fought the shah in Iranian revolution and lately he was known as strong leader in the fight against ISIS. A death in the hands of Americans solidified his reputation as hero.

[PickleRick]

Check this out from zerohedge

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/nyt ... rs-killing

Hours before a US strike at Baghdad's International Airport killed Iran's top military leader, Qasem Soleimani, former Obama National Security Council (NSC) official Steven Simon posited in a New York Times Op-Ed that Soleimani could be assassinated using a hypersonic missile while visiting Baghdad.

Reminds me of that movie... The Sum of All Fears.

Reminds me of that book......Isaiah

[ajax]

What Plan is Trump Following When It Comes to Iran?

The Big Lies The Trump Administration is Telling to Justify the Assassination of Qassem Suleimani

[mirkwood]

Buck Showalter was once ripped apart for running up the score as his team was stealing bases and taking extra bases while they were up by double digits.

In the post game press conference, his answer was simple: “When the other team stops trying to come back, I’ll stop trying to score....”

Regardless of who perpetrated 9/11 or what ideology they followed, the “memory” that is being referenced is that there are bad people out there....people whose SOLE existence is wrapped up in perpetrating evil, by proxy, giving them the upper hand.

Regardless of where he fits in the realm of ties to 9/11, if any at all, Quasem Soleimani was one of the most evil terrorists walking the planet, responsible for the loss of hundreds of American lives. Should we (America) have waited until he killed more??? How many more then???? What’s an acceptable number of lives lost before he deserves to be hunted???

We will never know how many lives Quasem’s death has saved.

But I will never forget what treating stone cold terrorists like they are inconsequential or incapable of mass destruction landed us. And if the vaporizing of Quasem prevented the loss of even ONE more American life, I’m good with it.

It’s hard for me to fathom that ANY American citizen WOULDNT be.

When they stop trying to come back, only THEN should we stop trying to win...and not a minute sooner.

[mirkwood]

For sure. He was known as a hero already when living: he fought the shah in Iranian revolution and lately he was known as strong leader in the fight against ISIS. A death in the hands of Americans solidified his reputation as hero.

[inho]

For sure. He was known as a hero already when living: he fought the shah in Iranian revolution and lately he was known as strong leader in the fight against ISIS. A death in the hands of Americans solidified his reputation as hero.

Sure, not all Iranians honor warmongers, but many do. I would guess that many respect him due to his role in the revolution.