Ed Pilkington: Suleimani killing the latest in a long, grim line of US assassination efforts // David Stockman: The Donald Is Now America First’s Own Assassin
NB: When Trump was first elected (and just before), numerous supposedly well-informed observers were looking forward to his presidency as a blow against Islamist extremism. Since then, he has demonstrated that his sole commitment is to his family business, the petro-chemical industry, the arms manufacturers, nullification of environmental regulations, rulers like Putin and regimes such as Saudi Arabia. He has abandoned the Kurds, who fought valiantly against ISIS; disregarded the Saudi royal family's involvement in the gruesome murder of journalist Khashoggi, and now assassinated the man (no angel mind you), who played a big role in the defeat of ISIS.
Those who hoped this racist motor-mouth would at least pull his country back from endless armed global interventions are now faced with another round of armed conflict. I wonder if our local contingent of Trump-worshippers will now invent another set of rhetorical justifications for this manic president's decision, but any number of arguments will not disguise the fact that the American political and military system with its hundreds of military bases (there's one in Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, given them by the UK) is a rogue element in the international system which unless curtailed, will cause endless damage to global society and the fast-deteriorating environment.
As this commentator observes, "While for ordinary people in all those countries there is only the certainty of more conflict, death and economic loss, for the political elite, the arms manufacturers, the military and security services and allied interests, the hedge funds, speculators and oil companies, there are the sweet smells of cash and power."
Weapons makers see stocks surge as Trump moves closer to war with Iran
There is another dimension to all this, the steadfast disregard of law, both internationally and within nation-states, coincident with the rise and/or consolidation of authoritarian regimes around the globe. Those who dismissed the very concept of the rule of law as a bogus myth will now have time and substance to think about their radical dreams. High-class criminals now rule vast swathes of the world, all in the name of The People, God's Chosen, and The Majority. Good luck to all. DS
As this commentator observes, "While for ordinary people in all those countries there is only the certainty of more conflict, death and economic loss, for the political elite, the arms manufacturers, the military and security services and allied interests, the hedge funds, speculators and oil companies, there are the sweet smells of cash and power."
Weapons makers see stocks surge as Trump moves closer to war with Iran
There is another dimension to all this, the steadfast disregard of law, both internationally and within nation-states, coincident with the rise and/or consolidation of authoritarian regimes around the globe. Those who dismissed the very concept of the rule of law as a bogus myth will now have time and substance to think about their radical dreams. High-class criminals now rule vast swathes of the world, all in the name of The People, God's Chosen, and The Majority. Good luck to all. DS
The US government is
no stranger to the dark arts of political assassinations. Over the decades it
has deployed elaborate techniques against its foes, from dispatching a chemist
armed with lethal poison to try to take out Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in the
1960s to planting poison
pills (equally unsuccessfully) in the Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s
food.
But the
killing of
General Qassem Suleimani, the leader of Iran’s elite military Quds Force,
was in in a class all its own. Its uniqueness lay not so much in its method –
what difference does it make to the victim if they are eviscerated by aerial drone
like Suleimani, or executed following a CIA-backed coup, as was Iraq’s ruler in
1963, Abdul Karim Kassem? – but in the brazenness of its execution and the
apparently total disregard for either legal niceties or human consequences.
“The US simply isn’t
in the practice of assassinating senior state officials out in the open like
this,” said Charles Lister, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in
Washington. “While Suleimani was a brutal figure responsible for a great deal
of suffering, and his Quds Force was designated by the US
as a terrorist organization, there’s no escaping that he was arguably the
second most powerful man in Iran behind the supreme leader.”
Donald Trump’s gloating
tweets over the killing combined with a sparse
effort to justify the action in either domestic or international law
has led to the US being accused of the very crimes it normally pins on its
enemies. Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif,
denounced the
assassination as an “act of international terrorism”. Vipin Narang, a
political scientist at MIT, said the
killing “wasn’t deterrence, it was decapitation”... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/04/us-political-assassinations-history-iran-suleimaniRobert Fisk: Trump is starting a war with Iran – whether it is by accident or design
David Stockman: The Donald Is Now America First’s Own Assassin
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? In 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 hellhole pulsating with sectarian frictions and anti-American
grievances – even as the rump state 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 8 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.... read more:
The costs of a war with Iran
The architects of the invasion of Iraq assured the American public that it would be a quick and cheap war. Instead, the cost of our cumulative wars in the Middle East likely exceeds a whopping $6 trillion by now, with nearly $3 trillion of that spent in Iraq. In addition to the loss of life, a war with Iran would almost certainly cost many trillions more. The mere prospect of the wealthiest country in the history of the human race squandering its money in this way is a moral outrage dwarfed only by the horrors of war itself. We know that just $300 billion would go a long way toward mitigating the climate crisis. Eliminating all student loan debt would cost around $1.6 trillion (though that overstates the case due to the enormous economic stimulus that doing so would provide.) We could end world hunger for just $30 billion a year by some estimates. Universal Pre-K? $140 billion a year–and again, that would have gigantic economic stimulus benefits. And so on...
see also
Victor Jara murder: ex-military officers sentenced in Chile for 1973 death
Donald Trump has blundered into a crisis of his own making with Iran. By Mohamad Bazzi
Tom Dispatch - William Astore, From Deterrence to Doomsday? // C. Wright Mills on The Structure of Power in American Society (1958) // The Week the World Almost Ended by Nate Jones and J. Peter Scoblic
