The audacious attack made the front page of the city editions; however, us hill folk had to wait until today for a below-the-fold triple play.
I begin by going backwards regarding the special "Confrontation in the Mideast" section that covers pages 8 and 9 of the ten page A section:
"Analysis: For Trump, a risky gamble to deter Iran" by David E. Sanger New York Times, January 3, 2020
The report is New York Times analysis by one of the underlings to Gordon and Miller regarding Iraq in 2003.
For a president who repeated his determination to withdraw from the cauldron of the Middle East, the strike that killed Major General Qassem Soleimani, who for two decades has been leader of Iran’s most fearsome and ruthless military unit, the Quds Force, means there will be no escape from the region for the rest of his presidency, whether that is one year or five. President Trump has committed the United States to a conflict whose dimensions are unknowable, as Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seeks vengeance.
They then turn to a Mr. Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute (funding tells you all you need to know), and Bruce Riedel, the former CIA officer who spent his life studying the Middle East and is now at the Brookings Institution (former means current), for analysis.
Iran’s history suggests they will not take on the United States frontally. Iranians are the masters of striking soft targets, starting in Iraq, but hardly limited to that country. In the past few years they have honed an ability to cause low-level chaos and left no doubt that they want to be able to reach the United States.
For now, they cannot — at least in traditional ways, but they have tried terrorism, including an abortive effort nine years ago to kill a Saudi ambassador in Washington, and late Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security was sending out reminders of Iran’s past and current efforts to attack the United States in cyberspace. Until now, that has been limited to breaches on US banks and scrutiny of dams and other critical infrastructure, but they so far have not shown they have the abilities of the Russians or the Chinese.
Beyond the framing of the Russians and Chinese for the black ops, one wonders whatever happened with the Saudi shooting down in Florida?? Got swept under the rug as fast as they evacuated the bin Ladens after 9/11!
Their first escalation may well be in Iraq, where they back pro-Iranian militias, but even there, they are an unwelcome force. It was only a few weeks ago when people took to the streets in Iraq to protest Iranian, not American, interference in their politics. Still, there are soft targets throughout the region, as the attacks on the Saudi oil facilities showed.
Yeah, someone noticed that "when Iranian embassy get burned down in Najaf it's civilians protesting Iranian influence, but when US embassy get stormed for killing Iraqis it's Iran backed Militia." That's the kind of pre$$ one must digest here in the U.S. before trying to discern the true situation behind the propaganda and deceptive distortions.
Complicating the management of a perilous moment is the president’s impeachment and the revival of Iran’s nuclear program.
And right on cue, the New York Times supplies the inference of an Iranian nuclear program. There is no evidence for that, not one iota, but that doesn't stop the NYT's analyst. It's the "Saddam has nukes" 2003 stuff all over again. One wonders if the Iranians are now wishing they had built a bomb.
It is only a matter of time before there are questions about whether the strike was meant to create a counternarrative, one of a conflict with a longtime adversary, while a Senate trial to determine whether to remove Trump begins, and already there are charges that the president overstepped his bounds and that the decision to kill Soleimani — if it was a decision, and the Iranian leader was not simply in the wrong convoy at the wrong moment — required congressional approval.
In all honesty, I'm tired of narratives being provided the agenda-pushing pre$$.
“The question is this,” asked Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, on Twitter as news of the strike spread. “As reports suggest, did America just assassinate, without any congressional authorization, the second most powerful person in Iran, knowingly setting off a potential massive regional war?”
That's what bothered me about MSNBC and CNN coverage I lowered myself to watch Thursday night. The worries were strategic and that Congre$$ wasn't informed (guess who was), not that this was an act of war and a war crime. It's nothing new, happens all the time; however, it's usually not a general of a foreign nation (now we know why troops are being moved out of Africa) attending funerals in a nearby country. Fox was even worse. Other than Tucker Carlson, the rest of the programming may well have been dancing in the streets as they promoted the war agenda. I was left wondering "where are the Iranian voices, the peace activists, the critics of empire?"
Trump will argue that he was well within his rights and that the strike was an act of self-defense, and he will have a strong argument: Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans in Iraq over the years, and doubtless was planning more.
The New York Times taking up as Trump's defense lawyer. I guess I've seen it all as the Times quotes the pulled out of thin air all of a sudden death counts of which the beloved patriot and hero of Iran is allegedly guilty and he was "doubtlessly" planning more.
I got a bridge to sell you if you buy that "analysis" from the New York Times.
The US announcement, from Defense Secretary Mark Esper, cited the general’s plans — which were not specified — as a justification for the action. If there was real intelligence of impending strikes, then the longtime principles of preemption, enshrined anew in US policy by president George W. Bush, would apply.
The end of the printed article leaves ones head spinning.
What do you mean IF? That's a pretty large qualifier given what has allegedly happened. If the intelligence was real? Is that the NYT covering their ass or fart bleating a truth in the most discreet way possible?
Then we are told, IF SO, the Trump defense is a "longtime principle of preemption" that was "enshrined anew" after the inside job attacks of 9/11 that enabled Bush to invade and occupy Iraq based on a bucket full off lies blared from the front-page of these very same papers that supported it.
Once you get through such contradictory gobbledegook, you realize the entire concept is simply an excuse to attack anybody we want for any reason at all, or none at all, and was present decades before Bush came along. One could even use it to defend the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the alleged Nazi invasion of Russia.
Anyway, that's where we are as the Globe's web version adds this:
The nuclear future is more complex. Trump walked away from the 2015 nuclear agreement more than a year ago, over the objections of many of his own aides and almost all US allies. At first the Iranians reacted coolly and stayed within the limits of the accord. That ended last year as tensions escalated.
Before the strike, they were expected to announce, in the next week, their next nuclear move, and it seemed likely to be a move closer to enrichment of bomb-grade uranium. That seems far more likely now, and poses the possibility of the next escalation, if it prompts US or Israeli military or cyber action against Iran’s known nuclear facilities.
I guess the New York Times would know. Kind of clues you in as to where all the hacking is really coming from.
Once it buries Soleimani, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard — which oversaw the secret projects to build nuclear weapons two decades ago — may well determine that it is time to surge ahead. There is little question the United States is far less likely to challenge a country with an existing nuclear arsenal. The Iranians, like the North Koreans and the Pakistanis, could well take Soleimani’s death as a warning about what happens to countries with no nuclear options.
As Reagan used to say, there they go again.
Even those critical of the president’s nuclear move said they understood why the Iranian general was such a target.
“These guys are the personification of evil,” said David Petraeus, the retired general who was an architect of the surge in Iraq, in an interview Thursday night. “We calculated they were responsible for at least 600 deaths” of American soldiers, but Petraeus offered a caution. “There will be an escalation,” he said. “I assume they have to do something. And the only question is, over time, have we created more deterrence than if we had not acted?”
Had the Iranians assassinated that guy when he was in country, their nation would already be glass. Mushroom clouds of hypocrisy.
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That article was followed by this further piece of analysis from the New York Times:
"Analysis: Is there a risk of wider war with Iran?" by Max Fisher New York Times, January 3, 2020
In the hours after a US drone strike in Iraq killed Iran’s most important military leader, Major General Qassem Soleimani, a question has dominated discussion in the Middle East, in Congress, and on social media. Could this lead to war between the United States and Iran?
In a sense, it already has. The killing of Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force, its elite security and intelligence unit, meets virtually any definition of an act of war, a categorical difference from the shadow conflicts that the United States and Iran have engaged in for years. To Iranian eyes, it is akin to Tehran ordering the death of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but killing one of those leaders is more than a slap in the face or a blow to military capabilities; it is a threat to the functioning of the state itself.
Iran has an extraordinarily difficult needle to thread. It will likely aim for counterattacks damaging enough to convince the United States that killing Soleimani was not worth it — a high bar, given his value and the far superior US military strength — but not so damaging as to trigger an all-out conflict. If Iran succeeds, the results could be costly to the United States and its allies but fall short of triggering outright war, but there is no way for it to know for sure what actions would meet both goals, and miscalculation could lead things to spiral out of control.
Senior officials have also described more sweeping goals like expelling Iran from the wider region or even toppling its government. The simple fact of overwhelming US military might, puts pressure on Iranian leaders to plan for the worst, and it makes it harder for them to know when they can safely back down.
That basically means the Project For the New American Century plan has been executed over these last 18 years, under both neoconservative and neoliberal cover -- and here we are.
Beyond that, what makes this NYT author think the Iranians feel they can safely back down? That's what the JCPOA was for.
Iran chose to cut a deal most recently in 2015, when, to relieve US-led economic sanctions, it surrendered the bulk of its nuclear program and permitted invasive inspections, but the United States had made that easier by seeking to demonstrate that Iran would not expose itself to existential threats by curbing its nuclear program. Months-long negotiations allowed Iranian leaders to feel confident that the terms were in their interest and had wide international backing, but President Trump’s penchant for making sudden policy changes, disdaining international support, and withdrawing from agreements, including that very nuclear accord, could shift Iran’s calculus. It may see gambling on retaliation as the safer option.
Iran has compiled with the agreement and is still expected to adhere to it even after the U.S. pulled out, and the assassination of the general simply confirms U.S. status as a rogue regime.
Iran is a regional power with far more sophisticated military capabilities than any country that the United States has gone to war with since World War II, and it has invested years of preparation in enduring a possible war. Iran’s escalations are expected to be asymmetric, which means using proxies or small attack groups to target American forces, allies, or economic interests. Iran has also shown a willingness to target civilians.
Iran has also shown a great deal of patience against never-ending U.S. onslaughts, be they overt or covert.
US adversaries have had little success in using asymmetric attacks to force Washington to back down — just as the United States has never found a reliable strategy for deterring asymmetric attacks.
The greatest risk may be that asymmetric Iranian warfare reaches a point in which the United States feels compelled to strike Iran directly. Analysts fear that this could lead to a direct, sustained war, but no one can say for sure how easily that might happen. Iran could hardly win a shooting war with the United States, but its conventional forces would make any ground war costly and drawn out, analysts project.
Like some sort of Gulf of Tonkin false flag in the Persian Gulf that sinks a U.S. aircraft carrier?
The suddenness of this escalation makes it difficult to know how fully Trump’s administration has thought through and planned for the potential consequences, and Iran’s willingness to take risky actions — perhaps driven by a perception that the scale of the US threat leaves it with no other choice — increases the danger to all sides.
The greatest stakes are not purely political. It can be easy for Americans to forget that Iran is not just an adversary, it is also home to over 80 million civilians, many of whom are already suffering under sanctions. Millions more across the Middle East, where proxy fights are likely to play out, would also be at risk. The burdens of any conflict are likely to fall overwhelmingly on those regular families, as they always do.....
Oh, I'm so happy the New York Times has taken up the antiwar torch and is now focused on the innocent victims of war, aren't you?
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We now turn to the front page:
"US and Iran exchange more threats as Democrats question timing of strike" by Michael Crowley, Peter Baker, Edward Wong and Maggie Haberman New York Times, January 3, 2020
WASHINGTON — The United States and Iran exchanged escalating military threats on Friday as President Trump warned that he is “prepared to take whatever action is necessary” if Iran threatens Americans and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vowed to exact vengeance for the killing on Trump’s order of Iran’s most valued general.
Although Trump insisted that he took the action to avoid a war with Iran, the continuing threats further rattled foreign capitals, global markets, and Capitol Hill, where Democrats demanded more information about the strike and Trump’s grounds for taking such a provocative and risky move without consulting Congress. Democrats also pressed questions about the attack’s timing and whether it was meant to deflect attention from the president’s expected impeachment trial this month in the Senate.
Speaking to reporters in a hastily arranged appearance at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort, Trump asserted that Major General Qassem Soleimani, who directed Iranian paramilitary forces throughout the Middle East, “was plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel, but we caught him in the act and terminated him.”
The callous disregard for the event makes one question his humanity and judgement.
General Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; and Robert C. O’Brien, the national security adviser, echoed Trump’s remarks, but Milley, Pompeo, O’Brien, and other senior administration officials did not describe any new specific threats that were different from what American officials say Soleimani had been orchestrating for years.
In Baghdad, the State Department urged US citizens to leave Iraq immediately, citing “heightened tensions.” The US Embassy, which had been under siege by pro-Iranian protesters chanting “Death to America” in recent days, suspended consular operations. At Fort Bragg, N.C., some 3,500 members of the 82nd Airborne, ordered to the Middle East this week, prepared to deploy to Kuwait.
Well, the protesters were sent home and the situation seemed to be calming down before this extrajudicial assassination of a foreign government official, so cui bono?
Speaking of living under siege, what is going on in Gaza these days?
On Wall Street, the stock market fell as oil prices jumped after the news of the general’s death.
Let's hope cooler heads prevail, 'eh?
The strike touched off an immediate debate in Washington, with Republicans hailing the action as a decisive blow against a longtime enemy with American blood on his hands and Democrats expressing concern that the president was risking a new war in the Middle East.
With Congress returning to town after the holidays for a presumed Senate impeachment trial, Trump risked suspicion that he was taking action overseas to distract from his political troubles at home, a la the movie “Wag the Dog.”
As a private citizen, Trump repeatedly accused President Barack Obama of preparing to go to war with Iran to bolster his reelection chances in 2012. As president, Trump has questioned his own intelligence agencies and peddled repeated falsehoods, a record that could undermine the administration’s credibility on the highly delicate subject.
Yeah, the internet is showing those old clips where he appears to be a self-fulfilling prophet and hypocrite. As for peddled falsehoods and credibility on war matters, he has no more or less that the very pre$$ reporting on all this. War mongers all. One almost misses Obama were it not for the Syrian destabilization effort, the regime change operations in Libya and Ukraine, assisting the murderous Saudis in Yemen, and eight slavish years of service to Israel.
Democratic leaders complained that Trump acted without consulting or even telling Congress first. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said that a classified briefing was being arranged for all senators next week and that everyone should welcome the demise of Soleimani.
No one is complaining about it being a war crime, something that is legitimately impeachable -- not some fucking phone call with a foreign leader.
A senior Iraqi official said Friday that there was a good chance the Iraqi Parliament would vote to force US troops to leave Iraq.
Good luck with that; however, it will put the U.S. government in a bind. Remember, this is an empire that doesn't occupy and only acts for altruistic reasons and for the good of oppressed people everywhere. We don't stay where we are not wanted, especially if the host country requests we leave. If we fight the Iraqis win this, the image is blown.
In more violence, another airstrike almost exactly 24 hours after the one that targeted Soleimani killed five members of an Iran-backed militia north of Baghdad, an Iraqi security official said. The Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Forces confirmed the strike, saying it hit one of its medical convoys near the stadium in Taji, north of Baghdad. The group said none of its top leaders were killed. A US official speaking on condition of anonymity said the attack was not an American military attack.....
Must have been Israel then.
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The Globe tells me this helps Joe Biden:
"Trump’s military strike might help Joe Biden by elevating foreign policy in the Democratic race" by Laura Krantz Globe Staff, January 3, 2020
WASHINGTON — Foreign policy has been largely an afterthought in the Democratic presidential race but President Trump might have changed that when he ordered a military strike that killed a top Iranian general.
Then again, he might not have.
As candidates on Friday criticized Trump’s move as a dangerous overreaction that could further destabilize the Middle East and lead to greater US military involvement, one contender appeared to have the most to gain — and potentially lose: Joe Biden.
The former vice president, a front-runner in the polls, has the deepest foreign policy experience in the Democratic race, but he also carries significant baggage, particularly when it comes to Iraq, where Thursday night’s strike took place. Biden voted to authorize the 2003 Iraq war, a point that one of his top rivals for the nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders, has been highlighting recently because he voted against the war.
Biden's deep experience is riddled with bad judgement, corruption, and failure, but Sanders has been kicking it lately and has gotten a real boo$t from Warren.
Like the other candidates, Biden slammed Trump’s actions, calling the attack counter to the Trump administration’s stated goal of deterring future attacks by Iran.
Biden is a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was a pivotal player on Middle East policy in the Obama administration. In a CNN poll in October, 53 percent of registered Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents said they thought Biden was the candidate they thought could best handle foreign policy. Sanders ranked second at just 13%.
Although Biden has sought to tout that experience, the Democratic race has focused mostly on domestic issues. Foreign policy questions have been rare at the six presidential debates, but Representative Seth Moulton, a Democrat from Salem who served four tours as a Marine in Iraq, said the race needs more discussion of US actions overseas.
“If we put forward a nominee whom Americans can trust as commander in chief, I think we have a much better chance of beating Donald Trump,” said Moulton, who launched a campaign for the Democratic nomination last year highlighting foreign policy and national security but got little traction and dropped out of the race in August.
It wasn't the Kristol endorsement, was it?
A candidate like Biden would be best suited to handle this situation because of his years of foreign policy experience, said Moulton, who has not made an endorsement in the race, but Sanders has been openly questioning whether Biden has the proper foreign policy judgment. At last month’s Democratic debate, Biden was describing his opposition to a US troop surge in Afghanistan during the Obama administration when Sanders’ hand shot up to respond.
“Joe, you’re also the guy who helped lead us into the disastrous war in Iraq,” he said.
As the two battle at the top of the national polls, Sanders has continued to pound that theme. Biden has been hit on his Iraq war vote as well by former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
“This is an example of why years in Washington is not always the same thing as judgment,” Buttigieg, an Afghanistan war veteran, said on an Iowa Public Television program last month. “He supported the worst foreign policy decision made by the United States in my lifetime, which was the decision to invade Iraq.”
He could well be the nominee given that he leads the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire.
On Friday, Sanders criticized Trump’s decision to launch the strike while emphasizing his consistent opposition to US military action in the Middle East, including his vote against the Iraq war. He didn’t mention Biden by name, but the implications were clear.
“At that time I warned about the deadly so-called unintended consequences of a unilateral invasion. Today, 17 years later, that fear has unfortunately turned out to be a truth,” Sanders said at a town hall event in Anamosa, Iowa.
The Vermont senator said that the wise course of action would have been to stick with the nuclear agreement negotiated with Iran by the Obama administration, which Trump withdrew from, and use diplomatic channels to address concerns like Iran’s support of terrorism.
“Trump promised to end endless wars. Tragically his actions now put us on the path to another war, potentially one that could be even worse than before,” Sanders said.
Sanders and the other leading progressive candidate, Senator Elizabeth Warren, are best positioned to pick up anger in the Democratic electorate about the strike, said Jeffrey Berry, a political science professor at Tufts University, but he doesn’t see the military action being a decisive issue in the primary race.
“Biden is certainly going to push the experience card and I think he’ll get a sound bite on the news . . . but is it going to pull people away from Sanders or Warren or Buttigieg? I’m skeptical,” Barry said.
He added that the strike could help Trump, who strives to be perceived as a tough commander in chief, unless it leads to an all-out war with Iran, which even some of his supporters would likely oppose.
Trump defended his actions on Friday, saying the strike was necessary because Soleimani “was plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel.”
“We took action last night to stop a war. We did not take action to start a war,” Trump said at his Mar-a-Lago resort in West Palm Beach, Fla.
He also said Iraq should thank us for all we have done for them in a tweet!
Despite that assertion, Brad Bannon, a Democratic strategist, said the military strike will feed into Biden’s campaign narrative that he is a steady, experienced leader.
“Any time you have tension coming from Iran or elsewhere it sort of plays into Biden’s argument that he’s a calm hand on the tiller,” said Bannon, who is not aligned with any candidate.
Isn't he the brother of Steve?
Biden is the Democratic candidate most likely to benefit, but injecting foreign policy into the party’s nomination race is healthy overall, Bannon said.
“For the first time there’s going to be a serious discussion of national security issues on the Democratic side,” he said.....
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Remember when Democrats were considered the party of peace?
"‘We are in one of those moments’: Local security experts react to Soleimani killing" by Brian MacQuarrie and Travis Andersen Globe Staff, January 3, 2020
The stunning killing of Iran’s top military commander by a US drone strike has taken out the longtime architect of anti-American violence in the Middle East, but the attack opened a Pandora’s box of geopolitical peril that could threaten the United States for years, security analysts, former diplomats, and combat veterans said Friday.
The problem is he was no Awlaki, Baghdadi, or Zarqawi.
Qassem Soleimani, the mastermind of Iran’s destabilizing military strategy from Iraq to Lebanon to Yemen, was responsible for killing more than 600 American service members and civilians over three decades, US officials have said, but his death Thursday night at Baghdad Airport in neighboring Iraq suddenly pushed a long-simmering confrontation with Iran toward yet another war in the Middle East, the analysts said. Whether the Trump administration has planned adequately for the aftermath of such a dramatic escalation in hostilities is far from clear, they added.
“I wouldn’t even pretend to guess how events will unfold from here,” said Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who lives in Walpole. “History is full of examples of how wars begin through inadvertence. Events take charge. We are in one of those moments where something like that could happen.”
“The big picture is this: That the global war on terrorism that began after 9/11 is going to continue,” added Bacevich, who also taught at Boston University.....
The Globe then turns to former Bush point man on Iran Nicholas Burns, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and Samantha Power, a Kennedy School professor who served as US ambassador to the United Nations under former president Barack Obama and was one of the architects of the Libyan action (as well as an unmasking leaker regarding the Trump transition officials), who suggested via Twitter that Trump will have difficulty justifying the killing to the world and it is “likely to get very ugly, very quickly.”
Meanwhile, Representative Seth Moulton, a Democrat from Salem, expressed grave doubts about whether the administration has planned for the treacherous road ahead, while some analysts praised the strike, including Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who served on the National Security Council under former president George W. Bush, saying, “Qassem Soleimani’s hands are drenched in American blood, and in the blood of Middle Easterners. What he got last night was justice.”
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?
And there Bush stands drenched in Iraqi and Afghani blood.
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The lone dissent in today's Globe was the letters column; however, the Globe edited them out.
