"Analytis: A volatile president with few restraints and growing power" by Mark Mazzetti New York Times, January 4, 2020
Oh, great, more NYT analysis.
WASHINGTON — The powers of an American president to wage war have grown stronger for nearly two decades, ever since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks led the United States into an era of perpetual conflict.
Uh-huh! The false flag inside job atrocity led us into an era of perpetual conflict -- just as its perpetrators intended it would.
Those powers are now in the hands of the most volatile president in recent memory.
OMG!
He's a mass-murdering war criminal, yes, but he has yet to approach Bush or Obama status.
President Trump’s decision to authorize the killing of a top Iranian military leader could be the match that sets off a regional conflagration, or it could have only marginal geopolitical impact like so many of the targeted killings ordered by Trump and his predecessors, but it is just the latest example of the capricious way in which the president, as commander-in-chief, has chosen to flex his lethal powers.
From his dealings with Iran, Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan, Trump has shown little evidence over the past three years that his decisions about war and peace are made after careful deliberation or serious consideration of the consequences.
In June, Trump shocked his vice president, his national security adviser, and his secretary of state when he reversed himself and called off a strike against Iran with only 10 minutes to spare. That decision, days after Iran downed an American reconnaissance drone, came in part after Trump consulted Tucker Carlson, the Fox News personality, who reminded the president that he had pledged to get out of foreign conflicts rather than begin new ones. A strike on Iran, Carlson said, could anger the president’s political base.
He wimped out on WW III and fired Bolton instead.
A little more than six months later, Trump ordered the killing of Major General Qassem Soleimani, who led the powerful Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. It was a move — set in motion after a rocket attack on Dec. 27 by forces linked to Iran killed an American contractor in Iraq — that Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama considered too provocative to authorize.
The war-making powers that Congress granted to the president in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks, combined with stunning advances in the technology of man-hunting, have given the inhabitant of the Oval Office the power to track and kill individuals practically anywhere on earth. Soleimani was not even a particularly difficult target at Baghdad International Airport on Friday, when his convoy was hit by missiles fired by an American MQ-9 Reaper drone.
We are now finding out he was lured there by talks of peace, Longshanks.
How Trump sees the killing of Soleimani as advancing his broader agenda on Iran is unclear, and Friday he seemed to portray the operation as something of a one-off: a necessary step to ensure that tensions between the United States and Iran do not spiral out of control. Soleimani was plotting “imminent and sinister attacks” before “we caught him in the act and terminated him,” the president said from his resort in Palm Beach, Fla., although administration officials did not describe any threats that were different from what they said the general had been orchestrating for years.
“We took action last night to stop a war. We did not take action to start a war,” Trump said. The president’s decision to kill the general at this time appeared to many military experts as a potentially reckless escalation, but his policy toward Iran, what administration officials call a “maximum pressure” campaign, has long underestimated how the country would respond to economic sanctions that have crippled its economy.
When Iranian operatives blew holes in oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman in June and launched drone strikes on Saudi oil facilities in September, Trump opted in both cases against a direct, immediate, military response. Still, one day after the drone strike targeting Soleimani, the Pentagon announced it was sending around 3,000 more troops to Kuwait as a precaution against growing threats to US forces in the region.
Those events now look like false flag fictions or provocations designed to provide the casus belli for the troop increase.
Lindsay P. Cohn, a professor of political science at the Naval War College, said that Trump appears to be convinced that Soleimani’s death will not lead to a significant surge of violence in the Middle East. It satisfies two imperatives for him: appearing to look tough without taking on, at least for now, any new commitments. “He doesn’t want to get entangled. But he doesn’t want to look weak,” said Cohn.
The New York Times turned to Cohn over at the Naval War College for expert analysis, huh?
The president’s mercurial approach to Iran has left a trail of alienated allies — including European NATO allies angry about his decision to withdraw from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and Arab nations in the Persian Gulf region uncertain about Trump’s resolve to support them in the face of direct attack from Iran.
There they go again, trying to goad him into war.
Trump’s blunt language about the folly of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan led some to conclude that he was shy about using force. The evidence shows the opposite, said Micah Zenko, a national security expert who writes frequently about US presidents and the use of military power.
During the three years of the Trump administration, airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia have sharply increased, as have civilian casualties, Zenko said, but rather than centralizing decisions about lethal force inside the White House, Trump has often devolved authority to military commanders.
Related:
"The Pentagon is weighing whether to sharply reduce or pull out several hundred US troops stationed in West Africa as the first phase of a global reshuffling of forces, but Defense Department officials said it was less likely that troops would be withdrawn from Somalia because — as Saturday’s attack gruesomely underscores — security in the country remains fraught. The Pentagon so far this year has carried out 60 drone strikes in Somalia. That compares with 47 strikes in 2018. The US Embassy in Mogadishu said in a tweet that the United States “continues to stand with Somalis in defeating and degrading terrorism.” The United Nations secretary-general, António Guterres, through his spokesman Stephane Dujarric, said “the perpetrators of this horrendous crime must be brought to justice.” There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but suspicion immediately fell on Al Shabab, a terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda....."
Also see: Extremists attack Kenya military base, 3 Americans killed
It comes after a US flag-raising at the camp in August signaled its change “from tactical to enduring operations,’’ and the latest attack comes just over a week after an al-Shabab truck bomb in Somalia’s capital killed at least 79 people and US airstrikes killed seven al-Shabab fighters in response and days after a US airstrike killed Iran’s top military commander and Iran vowed retaliation, but al-Shabab is a Sunni Muslim group and there is no sign of links to Shiite Iran or proxies “but it may have been well-timed to signal to Iran it is open for tactical alliances.’’
So once again it's another contractor being killed, or so we are told, and it just seems like all this is a repeat of 2003. Now they are commingling Al-CIA-Duh and Al-CIA-Bob with Iran rather than Iraq.
Zenko described the president as a “passive hawk,” wanting to appear tough without making decisions about military force that could incite long-term commitments.....
SIGH!
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Related: As tensions with Iran escalated, Trump opted for an extreme measure
Is that what they are calling war-criminal assassinations these days? Extreme measures?
That's like torture being described as enhanced interrogation.
"Cries of ‘revenge is coming’ at funerals for slain commanders in Iraq" by Alissa J. Rubin, Ben Hubbard and Falih Hassan New York Times, January 4, 2020
New York Times again.
BAGHDAD — As Iraq held joint funeral services on Saturday for two revered military leaders killed in an American drone strike near the Baghdad airport this past week, tens of thousands of pro-Iranian fighters marched through Baghdad, waving flags and chanting that “revenge is coming” to the United States.
The surprise killing on Friday of Major General Qassem Soleimani, the architect of Iran’s regional security strategy, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a powerful Iraqi militia commander and government official, threatened to shift fault lines across the Middle East.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vowed “forceful revenge” as the country mourned the death of Soleimani and calls have accelerated to eject the United States from Iraq. Across the region, fears are rising that the shadow war that had been building between the United States and Iran could suddenly escalate into a wide-ranging conflict.
President Trump, meanwhile, warned that the United States, too, was ready to respond if Tehran strikes back. He said Saturday that the United States had already “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.”
Trump did not identify the targets but added that they would be “HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.”
Yeah, solidify your status as a war criminal and cultural defiler. That will put you min the Bush category.
Trump says he ordered the strike, a high-risk decision that was made without consulting Congress or US allies, to prevent a conflict. US officials say Soleimani was plotting a series of attacks that endangered American troops and officials, without providing evidence.
Soleimani, 62, spent much of his life building Iran’s network of ties with militant groups across the Middle East, including in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
The extent of that network added to the uncertainty about how Iran might respond to his killing. If it chose to, Tehran could do so by relying on allied forces in any of those places to target American troops, or allies such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, or other countries in the Persian Gulf, but experts said it remained unclear how, when, and even whether Iran would make good on its threats of vengeance. They noted that the country had to balance its need to show resolve against a staunch enemy and its reluctance to thrust itself into a full-scale war with the United States, a much stronger power. That led some scholars to suggest that Iran’s response could end up being underwhelming.
“Technically, Iran could attack US bases in Syria or in Iraq, but that would drive an even greater retaliation from the United States that I don’t think even Iran would wish to happen,” said Lina Khatib, the head of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House, a London-based research institute.
“I may be in the minority here, but I think with this new development, despite Iran’s outlandish statements, ultimately Iran has been pushed into a corner,” she added.
OMG!
The funeral services were held against a backdrop of extreme regional tension as Iran and the United States signaled they could be on the brink of a potentially catastrophic war. Since the killings of Soleimani and al-Muhandis, neither side has made another move — although both have made threats.
At the joint funerals, as close to a state ceremony in Iraq as any since the fall of Saddam Hussein, a key pillar of Iran’s regional reach was on display in Baghdad. Many of the mourners were members of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, militias that came together to fight the Islamic State and are now overseen by the Iraqi security forces.
The most powerful of those militias are affiliated with Iran; their fighters wore somber faces and black clothes as they marched carrying the flags of their groups. The loss of al-Muhandis was a profound one for the Iraqi fighters, who saw him not just as a militia leader close to Iran but also as someone who had helped rally the armed groups when they first formed in 2014 to fight the Islamic State group as it threatened to sweep toward Baghdad, the Iraqi capital.
The militias have since been brought under the umbrella of the Iraqi military, and al-Muhandis was their deputy head. Many declared: “Our men do not fear America; each man dies on his day.”
Iran can count on a range of assets in the region, including the Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and a range of fighting groups in Iraq and Syria that operate close to small contingents of American troops.
In recent months, Iran and its allies have struck oil facilities in Saudi Arabia and targeted tanker traffic in some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf.
So we are told.
A senior commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard raised the prospect of possible attacks on ships in the Gulf, saying that Iran would retaliate against Americans wherever they were within reach of the Islamic Republic.
General Gholamali Abuhamzeh, the commander of the Guard in the southern province of Kerman, said on Friday in comments reported by the Tasnim news agency on Saturday: “The Strait of Hormuz is a vital point for the West, and a large number of American destroyers and warships cross there.”
He said Iran had long ago identified “vital American targets in the region,” and added, “Some 35 US targets in the region as well as Tel Aviv are within our reach.”
Amid the tensions, the United States has called on its citizens to leave Iraq, shuttered its embassy in Baghdad, sent additional Marines, and on Thursday deployed 700 members of the 82nd Airborne Division to the region. American contractors who train Iraqi troops have begun returning home.
The U.S. is getting ready to attack.
After the strike, Trump said the attack had been intended “to stop a war” and warned Iran that the United States military had already identified targets for further strikes “if Americans anywhere are threatened,” but critics have called the strike essentially a political assassination that could further destabilize the region.
Wasn't that the point?
On Saturday, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, said in a telephone call with his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, “The risky military action by the United States violates the fundamental norms of international relations and will worsen regional tensions and turmoil.”
“China urges the United States not to recklessly misuse armed force and to seek solutions to problems through dialogue,” Wang said, according to a summary of the call issued by the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, also spoke with Zarif, telling him that “such actions by the United States grossly violate the norms of international law,” according to a Russian Foreign Ministry statement.....
Those two countries are the BIG SHOW that the war planners are working towards!
You know, if they want to do it right here is what they should do: in conjunction with attacking Iran and slicing open the soft underbelly to Russia, EUSraeli forces should also open up a 3,000-mile front against Russia from the Arctic to the Caspian and show that Hitler fella how it's done. The third prong of attack should be to land on the beaches of North Korea to tie up China. It's a fool-proof plan that will push Chinese and Russians forces into Siberia where they can be safely nuked.
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"Iranians close ranks behind leaders after killing of Soleimani" by Richard Pérez-Peña and Farnaz Fassihi and New York Times, January 4, 2020
In cities across Iran, tens of thousands packed the streets to mourn Major General Qassem Soleimani. Black-clad women and men beat their chests and clutched photos of him. A black flag went up on the golden dome of Imam Reza shrine in the city of Mashhad, one of the holiest sites of Shiite Islam.
That's odd. I was given the impression that the Iranians were happy about it and the flag they raised was red.
Just a few weeks earlier, the streets were filled with protesters angry with their leaders over the flailing economy and the country’s international isolation, but at least for now, Iran is united — in anger at the United States.
The CIA destabilization assets were quickly put down, and the assassination has backfired.
For years, it has been a divided nation led by aged revolutionaries determined to impose their will on a predominantly young population with no memory of the Shah, who was deposed in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and with a thirst to live in a more normal nation integrated into the world.
It's more Jew York Times insult and distortion and it's reached the point disgust.
I'm wondering what is a more normal nation. One that picks off protesters from behind sand berms? One that attacks nations based on lies blared from pre$$ headlines? That kind of normal?
Suddenly, with one targeted assassination, the nation rallied behind its leaders.
Well, at least Trump united somebody.
Young and old. Rich and poor. Hard-liner and reformer, Soleimani, Iran’s most powerful military leader, was almost universally admired and had near cult figure status. He was killed in Baghdad on Friday in a drone strike ordered by President Trump.
His image is plastered across Tehran, often with black drapes reading in Arabic “God is Great.” In some neighborhoods residents placed black mourning flags at their doors.
In Iraq on Saturday, tens of thousands of pro-Iranian fighters marched through the capital, Baghdad, vowing to exact revenge on the United States at a funeral procession for two revered Iraqi military figures who were also killed in the attack on Soleimani, and in Iran, politicians and ordinary people of all stripes voiced support for supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The assassination appears to have solidified the hard-liners’ grip on power, neutralizing at least for the moment those who had called for talks with the West, experts inside and outside of Iran said.
Moderates had nurtured fading hopes of renewed talks with Washington — possibly between the two presidents.
Any talk of outreach or liberalization seems more dangerous than it has in years and likely to fade from public debate for the time being.
“At least in the short term, this will create a rally to the flag; Soleimani was personally popular,” said Vali R. Nasr, a Middle East scholar and former dean of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
As Soleimani’s body makes its way to three Iranian cities for a state-like funeral procession over the next few days, Iranians in large numbers are expected to attend and display their solidarity and defiance. This show of unity, however, could be short-lived.
It reaches the point where one just shakes his/her head at this endless garbage the NYT trowels. Wishful thinking as they supply a false narrative of the situation.
Iran is giving Soleimani a combination of state and saint funeral. His body will make a pilgrimage to shrines in all the holy cities of Shia Islam from Samarra, Kadhimiya, Karbala and Najaf to Mashad, and Qom. On Monday the body will be at Tehran University where Khamenei will perform the prayer of the dead and then taken to burial in his hometown of Kerman on Tuesday.
The deep grievances that ignited protests against the government in November still remain in place: economic hardship, international isolation, and social oppression. Some Iranian opposition supporters have praised the assassination and are in favor of Washington increasing its maximum pressure policy on Iran’s rulers.
Sure they are.
Just last month, mass antigovernment protests shook Iran, showing deep discontent — which only grew with a brutal crackdown that killed up to 1,000 people. Fury at the United States is now expected to deflect attention from economic suffering and the recent protests, and the assassination may provide Iran’s leaders with an excuse to intensify its repression of dissenters and critics.
This war-promoting Jew York Times propaganda has become gross.
Soleimani’s killing “was the worst thing that could happen to civic movements in Iran and Iraq,” said Amir Rashidi, an Iranian cybersecurity expert based in New York. “It means more pressure on people who are already being squeezed politically and economically.”
Actress Bahareh Rahnama, one of Iran’s biggest celebrities who is typically outspoken for women’s rights and human rights, posted on her Instagram with nearly 4 million followers, a message of condolence for Iran in the aftermath of Soleimani’s killing.
“We are forgetful people, how soon we forget how close ISIS was to us and who defeated this monster,” she wrote.....
Really?
Forgotten already, huh?
I wonder how long it will take them to forget the U.S. assassinated him.
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It wasn't just Iran who admired him:
"Why Soleimani’s body is being brought to the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala" by Miriam Berger Washington Post, January 4, 2020
Oh, yay, it's WaComPo and not NYT!
Yaaaaay!
The funeral procession for Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani began Saturday in Baghdad, where he was killed a day earlier by a US drone strike. The next stops for Soleimani’s body were the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala, sites that are holy for Shi’ite Muslims. Soleimani’s burial was scheduled for Tuesday in Kerman, his hometown in southeastern Iran, state media in Iran reported.
It's RFK-like for those that remember!
Najaf is a center for learning and pilgrimage site for Shi’ites, who make up about two-thirds of Iraqis and the dominant branch of Islam in Iran.
Each year, thousands of Iranians, as well as other religious pilgrims, travel to Najaf to visit the golden-domed shrine of Imam Ali, one of the founding leaders in Islam and highly revered by Shi’ites. Ali was the cousin and son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad. Shi’ites consider Ali, who was killed in 661 by a member of a rival sect, as the rightful successor to the prophet.
The city and the clerics based there have also been a quiet battleground for Iran in its efforts to extend political, economic, religious, and military influence over Iraq, as the Post’s Erin Cunningham and Mustafa Salim reported last year.
‘‘In Najaf’s dusty warrens, Iran has bankrolled schools and charities, built elaborate mosques and nurtured links with religious scholars in a bid to undermine the local clergy, who have long been fiercely independent,’’ they wrote. ‘‘Clerics tied to Iran are promoting its particular brand of state-sponsored Shi’ite theology in the city’s seminaries and have been maneuvering to install one of their own as Iraq’s ‘marja,’ or supreme religious authority, Iraqi political operatives say.’’
That position is currently held by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, 89, Iraq’s most influential cleric who has opposed some of Iran’s core teachings around religious oversight of state affairs.
In November, during the height of protests against the Iraq’s political establishment — including its links to Iran — protesters set fire to the Iranian consulate in Najaf.
That tipped the hand not who was really behind the protests.
Karbala is another sacred city in Shi’ite Islam, revered as the burial place of Imam Hussein. In the late seventh century, Hussein was killed in a battle that marked a doctrinal schism in Islam between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims. His death is mourned and memorialized yearly in Shi’ite tradition known as Muharram, named after the month he was killed.
Karbala is a major pilgrimage site, with the mosque built in Imam Hussein’s memory the main destination. Today the mosque is ornately adorned, but the elaborate renovations are relatively new. Under Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led rule, Shi’ite sites were marginalized.
In the violence and civil war that followed the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Karbala also was a battleground. In 2007, an attack against coalition troops killed five US soldiers stationed there. US officials have blamed Soleimani and his Quds Force for orchestrating it.
That's how the CIA paper's article ended!
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"Why Soleimani’s killing is different from other US targeted attacks" by Siobhán O’Grady Washington Post, January 4, 2020
Oh, yay, another WaComPo piece!
In recent years, the United States has launched several risky military operations to kill individuals it viewed as posing a direct threat to US national security, including raids against the leaders of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, but analysts warned that Friday’s airstrike on a two-vehicle convoy near the Baghdad airport that killed senior Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani and several other people differs greatly from earlier strikes on extremist operatives and puts the United States — and the Middle East — in dangerously uncharted territory.
‘‘This is a very different level of escalation,’’ said Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. After targeted killings of extremists, he said, the greatest cause for concern ‘‘might be a brief intensification of fighting or some kind of limited reprisals against the US military.’’
Oh, man, that is one of the guys who was all over television in 2002 and 2003 in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.
After the killing of Soleimani, the United States could face direct Iranian reprisals, including potential cyberattacks, analysts said. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, threatened ‘‘severe revenge’’ but gave no indication of what could come.
Barbara Slavin, the director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council, said Trump is ‘‘trying to do a victory lap here and beat his chest and somehow show this is like killing Baghdadi.’’ She was referring to the October raid on the hideout of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in northwestern Syria. ‘‘But it’s not. It’s much more serious,’’ she said.
The Atlantic Council has ties to the rich Sunni sheikdoms, including Saudi Arabia.
Like Baghdadi’s, other targeted killings carried out by the United States have typically struck at extremist leaders without affiliations to a powerful state such as Iran.
In 2011, a drone strike killed the US-born Al Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki, marking the first acknowledged case of the United States tracking and killing one of its own citizens with a drone abroad. Three years later, a federal court released a Justice Department memo that had previously been secret, which outlined the government’s legal justification for the killing. The document claimed that Awlaki’s ties to Al Qaeda put him ‘‘within the scope’’ of military force approved by Congress following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Earlier in 2011, former President Obama announced that Navy SEALs had raided a compound in Abottabad, Pakistan, and killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda who plotted the 9/11 attacks, and last year, a US military operation led al-Baghdadi to detonate a suicide vest, killing himself and three of his children, but in those cases, Cordesman said, ‘‘you were killing a leader in a context of an ongoing operation against an extremist movement which did not have a major state sponsor.’’
I'm not going to go into the history of the three CIA assets they just mentioned, nor the fictions in their reported killings as they are pulled in and out the grave. We are told this all traces back to that inside job and false flag atrocity that kick-started the PNAC-Yinon plan and with which Iran had nothing to do with.
‘‘Here you’re talking about . . . somebody who was recognized throughout the gulf region, for good or bad, as a figure sponsoring groups and supporting countries with a great deal of popular support,’’ he said.
Soleimani joined Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in its early days after the 1979 revolution in Iran and grew into one of the most influential military commanders in the region, eventually taking control of the elite Quds Force, a branch of the Revolutionary Guard, in the late 1990s. The group aligned itself with Shiite militias in Iraq after the US-led invasion in 2003, and the Pentagon has accused militias linked to Iran of killing hundreds of US troops there. Iraqi militia commander Jamal Jaafar Ibrahimi, also known by the name Abu Mahdi al-Mohandis, was also killed in Friday’s airstrike near Baghdad’s airport.....
That's where the printed article ended.
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"Conflict with Iran threatens fight against ISIS" by David D. Kirkpatrick New York Times, January 4, 2020
The byline makes me want to puke.
For militants of the Islamic State, the US drone strike that killed Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani was a two-for-one victory.
First, the killing of Soleimani removed the leader of one of the Islamic State’s most effective opponents, responsible for building up the alliance of Iran-backed militias that did much of the ground fighting to drive militants out of their strongholds in Syria and Iraq.
The assassination has also redirected the wrath of those militias and their many political allies inside Iraq squarely against the US presence there, raising doubts about the continued viability of the US-led campaign to eradicate what is left of the Islamic State extremist group and to prevent its revival in both Iraq and neighboring Syria.
Uh-huh.
See: America Created Al-Qaeda and the ISIS Terror Group
All of a sudden the agenda-pushing war propaganda makes sense!
“This is precisely the sort of deus ex machina the organization needed to give it room to operate and to allow it to break out of its current marginality,” said Sam Heller, an analyst at the International Crisis Group who studies the fight against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. “Even if the American forces are not withdrawn immediately, it is very difficult for me to imagine that they can meaningfully continue the counter ISIS fight.”
A lot of them have been sent to Libya.
Former defense and intelligence officials said that the escalating American confrontation with the Iran-backed Iraqi militias directed by Soleimani will now mean that the US forces in both Syria and Iraq must worry as much about protecting themselves from attack as they do about fighting the Islamic State, a distraction that could seriously hamper the campaign.
“They are going to be too focused on protecting the mission instead of on fighting ISIS,” said Dana Stroul, a former senior Pentagon official and the co-chair of a congressionally sponsored bipartisan Syria Study Group, but a more sweeping and immediate first test will come Sunday, when the Iraqi parliament is expected to vote on a proposal to expel US forces from Iraq.
What is the mission then?
The nearly 5,000 US troops stationed in Iraq provide essential support to Iraqi forces trying to hunt down thousands of ISIS insurgents still plotting attacks from hideouts in remote rural areas, deserts, and mountains.
Without American surveillance, intelligence, transportation, and air support, analysts said, Islamic State fighters would detect the sweeps by Iraqi forces in plenty of time to escape and evade — allowing the ISIS fighters impunity to rebuild their organization.
What’s more, the intelligence and logistical support provided by the US military is equally necessary to European and other military partners in the US-led international coalition against ISIS.
Once you know who is really behind ISIS™ you begin to understand why they never go away despite all the success.
Even the smaller contingent of fewer than 1,000 US service members still deployed to fight the Islamic State in Syria would be impossible to sustain without support from the Americans inside Iraq, and some analysts argued that President Trump’s drawdown in Syria had already left US forces there vulnerable to attack while alleviating the pressure against ISIS.
Those troops are still securing the oil so it can be stolen, though, and that's the real rub. Looks like Iraq was invaded so it could be occupied and then used as a base to attack surrounding countries. That's what's it's looking like.
As a result, a parliamentary vote to expel US forces from Iraq would effectively end the military effort to defeat ISIS and thwart a comeback.
Yup, uh-huh. Gotta stay then even if they ask us to leave.
“That is the end of the D ISIS mission as we know it,” Stroul, now a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote in a text message, using initials for the coalition to defeat the Islamic State.
Oh, she is now at WINEP!
Those are the objective experts that the New York Times turns to for analysis.
How little things have changed since 2003, huh?
The Iraqi government established after the US invasion in 2003 has long struggled to balance its dependence on Washington and the West against its close ties to its neighbor Iran. The Iraqi government in Baghdad relied heavily on those Iranian-backed militias in the fight against ISIS and many Iraqi politicians have their own close ties to Iran. Among them are many leaders or representatives of those Iran-backed Iraqi Shiite militias who have now been elected to parliament.
What’s more, US officials have repeatedly reassured nervous Iraqis that the US forces that returned in 2014 had come only to support the Iraqi fight against ISIS. US diplomats and military officers have always emphasized that US forces were present only at the formal invitation of the Iraqi government and only to help increase the capacity of Iraqi forces to combat ISIS themselves. but in the last week, US forces in Iraq have not only assassinated Soleimani. The same drone strike killed a senior Iraqi militia leader who was also a top government security official and a former member of parliament. His Iraqi public relations chief was killed, too, and in the preceding days, the United States had already killed more than 25 Iraqi fighters from a major Iran-backed militia. They were killed in a missile strike carried out in retaliation for a rocket attack that had killed one US soldier and injured several others inside an Iraqi military base.
Now it was a soldier and not a contractor that was allegedly killed in the event that kicked this all off. For all we know, that could be a complete lie. We are just supposed to accept all this war-promoting garbage coming from the same people who lied us into Iraq.
Btw, the missile strike in response to the base attack hit a border crossing halfway across the country.
“Action of this type is an obvious grave breach of those agreed-upon terms” of the US military’s return to Iraq, said Heller of the International Crisis Group. Even if the parliament does not immediately expel US forces, he said, “I don’t see how, in the wake of these killings, the US presence continues.”
The vote is not binding so the U.S. won't be going anywhere.
Who is going to evict them? The Iraqis?
US officials have long considered Soleimani a fearsome enemy. After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, he helped form and direct Iran-backed Shiite militias in Iraq blamed for killing hundreds of Americans, but in the fight against the Islamic State after 2014, the United States had tacitly accepted Soleimani as an awkward ally. Iran’s Shiite Muslim clerical rulers found common cause with Washington against the Sunni militants of ISIS, and the Iranian-backed militias sponsored by Soleimani did much of the fighting on the ground while American jets, helicopters, and drones provided air power.
The message there is never, ever, work with the Americans. They will betray you.
The militias also stopped attacking US forces who returned to Iraq, and those forces settled into positions inside Iraqi military bases, where they depend for their safety and protection on Iraqi security forces — despite their hosts’ many ties to Iran.....
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God forbid they ever get an atomic bomb.
The conflagration will be immense.
Those trying to put out the fire:
"‘War does not achieve peace’ — Demonstrators in Boston rally against US killing of Iranian leader" by John Hilliard and Maysoon Khan Globe Correspondents, January 4, 2020
Angered by nearly two decades of US military action in the Middle East, hundreds of demonstrators marched through downtown Boston Saturday to demand American officials avoid war with Iran and called on them to withdraw troops from the region.
Demonstrators marched shoulder to shoulder for more than an hour, some carrying flags representing Veterans for Peace, while others held signs that read “No War With Iran” and “Money for Jobs & Education Not War & Occupation.”
The demonstration was one of about 70 across the nation Saturday, organized following Thursday’s killing of Qassem Soleimani, a top Iranian military leader who oversaw efforts to destabilize the region, in a US drone strike in Iraq. US officials have said Soleimani had been responsible for the deaths of more than 600 Americans, and was planning future attacks.
And yet they were only featured on the front page of the B-section and were not mentioned at all in all the articles that came before. Kinda blunts my appreciation for them even running the piece.
Iran has threatened revenge for the strike, and the administration has said the United States will sending nearly 3,000 additional American troops to the Middle East, while thousands more are already in Iraq to train local forces. That escalation would be a break from Trump’s campaign promise to reduce American presence in the Middle East.
Along with opposition to a potential war with Iran, protesters also demanded American troops still fighting Iraq and Afghanistan be brought home.
A Gallup poll released in August found widespread opposition to US military action in Iran. The poll found 78 percent of respondents said the United States should rely on economic and diplomatic efforts with Iran, with 18 percent favoring military action, according to Gallup, but.....
But our leaders are not listening because they are slaves to Israel and AIPAC.
--more--"
At least the Globe is standing up for “people who are feeling vulnerable” and helping to stop the hate.
What's even worse, the football game was blacked out (be glad you didn't see it).
Also see: Our 2020 Vision
The Globe Editorial Board’s resolutions for the new year include no worries about Trump or war as democracy itself is under siege.
"Iran ends nuclear limits as killing of Iranian general upends Mideast" by Ben Hubbard and Alissa J. Rubin New York Times, January 5, 2020
That's today's top story!
BEIRUT — The consequences of the United States’ assassination of a top Iranian general rippled across the Middle East and beyond on Sunday, with Iran ending commitments it made to limit its nuclear fuel production and Iraqi lawmakers voting to expel US forces from their country.
Steeling for retaliation from Iran, a US-led coalition in Iraq and Syria suspended the campaign it has waged against the Islamic State for years, and hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the street to mourn the assassinated general, Qassem Soleimani.
Warning Iran not to attack, President Trump said the United States had pinpointed 52 targets in Iran, including cultural sites. The sites, he said, represented the 52 American hostages held at the US Embassy in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
He has become a most odious and disgusting creature, and should be removed from office right now.
Amid outrage in Iran, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif declared that “targeting cultural sites is a war crime” and predicted that the “end of US malign presence in West Asia has begun.”
Trump has said that the killing of Soleimani on Friday was aimed at preventing war, but so far, it has unleashed a host of unanticipated consequences that could dramatically alter where the United States operates. Increasingly, the killing appeared to be generating effects far beyond Washington’s ability to control.
That may include Iran’s nuclear future. So the top headline and story in today's Globe is a NYT article that is basically implying that Iran will soon be building a bomb.
It's 2003 all over again, folks, and that sucks.
On Sunday, the Iranian government said it was abandoning its “final limitations in the nuclear deal,” the international agreement intended to prevent the country from developing nuclear weapons. Iran will, however, continue its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency and return to the nuclear deal if the economic sanctions imposed on it are removed and Iran’s interests guaranteed, the government said. US sanctions have hit Iran’s oil-based economy particularly hard.
Soleimani was a towering figure both in Iran and across the Middle East, where he cultivated proxy militias in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Since he was killed in a US drone strike at the Baghdad airport Friday alongside a powerful Iraqi militia leader, Iran and its partners have launched calls for vengeance.
US allies have largely kept quiet so as not to put themselves in the line of fire.
Lawmakers in Iraq voted Sunday to require the government to end the presence of US troops in the country after the United States ordered the assassination on Iraqi soil.
The vote will not be final until it is signed by the prime minister, and it was unclear whether Iraq’s current caretaker government had the authority to end the relationship with the US military.
The NYT is acting like a solicitor-general for continued U.S. occupation.
Few doubted, however, that the country would take whatever legal actions were necessary to compel a US departure over the coming months. Asked shortly before the parliamentary vote whether the United States would comply with an Iraqi government request for American troops to leave, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo would not answer directly, saying the United States was watching the situation.
Although the vote in Parliament was 170-0, lawmakers were more divided on the issue than that tally may suggest.
It's a unanimous vote and the New York Times is telling us they are divided.
HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!
They are telling us that Sunni Muslim factions and the Kurds wanted the United States to stay, but voted leave anyway.
Why anyone would believe anything in the New York Times these days is beyond me.
The legislation threads a fine needle: While using strong language demanding that the government “end any foreign presence on Iraqi soil and prevent the use of Iraqi airspace, soil, and water for any reason” by foreign forces, it gives no timetable for doing so.
It would end the mission approved in 2014 that gave the United States the explicit task of helping Iraqi forces fight the Islamic State. That agreement gave the Americans substantial latitude to launch attacks and use Iraqi airspace, but the measure would leave in place the Strategic Framework Agreement, which allows a US troop presence in Iraq in some form, although only “at the invitation of the Iraqi government.”
Yeah, the 2014 agreement came after Obama withdrew in 2011 and after the rise of ISIS.
Hmmmmm!
On Sunday, the US-led coalition in Iraq and Syria said that it would pause its yearslong mission of fighting the Islamic State and training local forces in both countries.
A pullout of the estimated 5,200 US troops in Iraq could cripple the fight against the Islamic State, or ISIS, and allow its resurgence.
You just shake your head at this blatant propaganda.
A smaller contingent of about 1,000 US troops are in eastern Syria.
As the Middle East braced for Iranian retaliation, which analysts said was all but inevitable and US officials said they expected within weeks.....
Meaning the false flags are coming.
--more--"
This article appeared below that one on the inside of the paper:
"US allies in Mideast fear they may pay a price for Soleimani killing" by Ben Hubbard New York Times, January 5, 2020
BEIRUT — Many in the region hate Iran for what they see as its efforts to build Shiite militias to advance its interests and undermine Arab states in a majority-Sunni region. That left many pleased, privately at least, the United States had killed Major General Qassem Soleimani, the mastermind of Iran’s regional efforts and the most visible face of that project.
Khalid al-Dakhil, a political sociologist in Saudi Arabia, criticized Iran for selling itself to the Arabs as the head of “the resistance” — the regional struggle against the United States and Israel — when it has expended more effort in recent years amassing power in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. “What kind of a resistance is this?” he said.
Phony Democratic Party resistance?
Of course, we know which side the Saudis are on.
While many Persian Gulf leaders agree, they have not publicly praised Soleimani’s killing.
“Saudi Arabia and all the Gulf countries are just quiet,” al-Dakhil said. “They don’t want to antagonize the Iranians, because the situation in the region is so delicate, so divided, so sensitive, that you don’t want to stir it up further.”
Prince Khalid bin Salman, the Saudi deputy defense minister, flew to Washington this weekend for consultations. On Saturday, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, foreign minister of Qatar, met with his Iranian counterpart in Tehran.
That was part of the deescalation plan and possible peace proposal that Trump obliterated with his drone assassination.
Exacerbating the nervousness in the Gulf are questions about the extent of the support countries can expect from Trump should they become the target of Iranian retaliation, be it military action, a cyberattack, or sabotage, said Barbara Leaf, a former US ambassador to the United Arab Emirates now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Hey, there they are again!
That's where the printed copy ended.
The situation is also complex for American allies in countries where the United States competes for influence with Iran.
In Syria, rebels, activists, and exiles who oppose the government of President Bashar Assad rejoiced at news of Soleimani’s killing, since they held him responsible for backing Assad’s military, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people, but the United States gave up on the effort to remove Assad from power years ago, and Syrian Kurds, a US ally in the battle against the Islamic State, have no idea how long the United States will stick around.
I don't think they have given up on regime change in Syria; in fact, this appears to be part of that.
As for U.S. troops sticking around, I wouldn't worry. We never leave.
In Iraq, where the United States has invested thousands of lives and billions of dollars, few thanked it publicly for killing Soleimani, who oversaw the expansion of Iranian influence there, primarily though ties to the country’s Shiites. Even Kurds and Sunnis who may prefer the United States to Iran kept quiet to avoid provoking their Shiite compatriots and their powerful militias.
In Lebanon, American allies were also keeping quiet to avoid provoking pro-Iran forces there. Soleimani was key to the growth of Hezbollah into a major political party and the country’s strongest military force.
Even Israel remained notably restrained. For Israelis, Soleimani was an arch foe and practically a household name, having surrounded the country with hostile proxy forces armed with tens of thousands of rockets and missiles. His name was associated with a quarter-century of attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets abroad, but Israeli celebrations were muted amid concerns that Israel could end up a target for Iranian retaliation. Israeli officials also wanted to avoid any suggestion of involvement in the Soleimani killing.....
That last paragraph is so revealing. It tells you who really did this, or on whose behalf Trump did this. Thus it must be kept from the American people.
--more--"
They also talked to a senior fellow at the foundation New America who works in the Persian Gulf.
"Pompeo warns Iran that US could attack if Tehran retaliates" by Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Edward Wong New York Times, January 5, 2020
Oh, New York Times again.
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned Iran on Sunday that the United States could attack the country within its borders and its leaders if they take hostile actions.
Then it is a war of aggression.
“I’ve been part of the discussion and planning process — everything I’ve seen about how we will respond with great force and great vigor if the Iranian leadership makes a bad decision,” Pompeo said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We hope that they won’t, but when they do, America will respond.
“We will be bold in protecting American interests, and we’ll do so in a way that’s consistent with the rule of law,” he added.
So says the official from a lawless and rogue regime.
In appearances on six television news shows Sunday morning, Pompeo underscored President Trump’s message the previous day that the United States had chosen sites to attack within Iran if the country ordered assaults on US assets or citizens in retaliation for Soleimani’s death.
Oh, Pompeo was out there doing public relations and damage control.
Trump wrote on Twitter that the United States had picked 52 sites, “some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture,” that “WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.”
The targeting of cultural sites is against international law, and critics denounced Trump for his statement.
When asked Sunday by several interviewers whether the United States would attack cultural sites, Pompeo avoided answering directly. He said on ABC’s “This Week” that the United States would “behave lawfully” and “behave inside the system.”
You can impeach his obese ass, too, 'kay?!
After those verbatim paragraphs, the web version of the story melds with the accompanying printed article next door:
The US-led coalition in Iraq and Syria halted its campaign against the Islamic State on Sunday as US forces braced for retaliation from Iran over a strike that killed a powerful Iranian commander, military officials said.
In a statement, the US command said that after repeated attacks on Iraqi and US bases in recent weeks, one of which killed an American contractor Dec. 27, “we have therefore paused these activities, subject to continuous review.”
“We remain resolute as partners of the government of Iraq and the Iraqi people that have welcomed us into their country to help defeat ISIS,” the statement said. Using the Arabic name for the Islamic State, it added, “We remain ready to return our full attention and efforts back to our shared goal of ensuring the lasting defeat of Daesh.”
Oh, yeah?
When?
Did they ask us to invade?
What if they say we are no longer welcome?
The move comes after the deaths last week of Major General Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian security and intelligence commander responsible for the deaths of hundreds of troops over the years, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a powerful Iraqi militia commander and government official, in a US drone strike outside the Baghdad airport. About 5,200 troops in Iraq and several hundred in Syria are now focused on fortifying their outposts instead of pursuing remnants of the Islamic State and training local forces.
What remains to be seen is what, exactly, Iran will do in retribution for the strike. In recent days, tens of thousands of pro-Iranian fighters took to the streets in Baghdad, chanting that “revenge is coming” to the United States.
In both Syria and Iraq, the United States has maintained an archipelago of outposts, bases, and airfields, all connected by ground and air transport routes, where small contingents of US troops are either training local forces or working alongside them to carry out counterterrorism operations against the Islamic State.
The cessation of those missions to instead focus on security is likely to allow what remains of the terrorist group to reconstitute itself in the ungoverned spaces where it flourishes, much as it did when Turkey invaded northern Syria in October. Iranian-backed militias had been an ally in the fight against the Islamic State. Such groups have now turned their attention toward the United States.
“The fight against ISIS has been significantly degraded by the tensions between the US and Iran,” said Michael Knights, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He cited the fact that US forces have recently been excluded from ground operations and have had airspace closed to them in the battle against the terrorist group as a result of pressure on the Iraqi government from Iran-backed militias operating in the country.
Once again, the NYT turns to WINEP!
One way that the US-led effort stands to be further degraded is if Special Operations forces limit their missions, he said. US troops are deployed in several joint US and Iraqi bases spread across the country, where they have been keeping pressure on resurgent ISIS cells.
The administration’s decision to suspend counterterrorism operations after the strike on Soleimani drew sharp criticism from many former intelligence and counterterrorism specialists.
“The Trump administration that promised to ‘annihilate’ ISIS has now stopped operations against ISIS to protect US troops from Iranian retaliation,” said Joshua Geltzer, who was the senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council during the Obama administration, on Twitter on Sunday. “So Trump stops addressing an existing threat to deal with one of his making.”
Who do they turn to?
A Jew who used to work for Obama talking about self-created threats -- like ISIS!
Anyone with half a brain or a cognizant memory can recognize this regurgitated war propaganda and who is behind it.
Other security analysts said the administration now faces an escalating multifront fight against an array of Sunni and Shi’ite violent extremists.
“The entire US mission in the Middle East is being repositioned from a specific and focused goal of defeating ISIS to an amorphous and open-ended campaign to counter Iran,” Colin Clarke, a senior fellow at the Soufan Center, a research organization for global security issues, said in an e-mail. “This will provide ISIS with the operational space needed to reconstitute its networks across Iraq and Syria. US forces will be overstretched while also becoming more attractive targets for a broad array of adversaries.”
I have no idea who is he or what is the Soufan Center; however, it looks like the same old kind of stink tank that makes one think.
The US military has long had plans to contend with an Iranian military incursion in the region, according to a former senior defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Those plans include moving important US assets stationed in the Middle East, such as warships and aircraft, away from possible attack points and shutting down smaller, more exposed bases, or at least withdrawing US troops from them.
Those last two paragraphs let you know that this has been the plan all along. The PNAC plan is in place and almost near completion. Claiming the plans are to withdraw is laughable in the face of increased forces being sent to the region. I don't know who they think is buying their BS.
Meanwhile, the web version kept these small, somewhat rewritten passages:
Iran, meanwhile, said Sunday it would limit its response to US military targets. ‘‘The response for sure will be military and against military sites,’’ Hossein Dehghan, the military adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, said in an interview with CNN.
Thus any attacks against U.S. civilian targets can be considered false flags.
--more--"
What my print article contained was Trump saying on Twitter that his response to any retaliation with Iran may be disproportionate before detailing Pompeo's ma$$ media appearances and Rand Paul's criticism. The Times then brought up the nuclear deal, a deal Kerry literally broke a leg for, with other nations urging Iran to continue to abide by the deal as Trump's tweeting has united Iranians.
The end of the article said that the the executive branch has an open-ended war authorization from Congress in 2001 to go after Al Qaeda and partner groups in retaliation for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that some members of Congress and some senior administration officials are making the case that the 2001 authorization could encompass Iran because of ties to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and on Friday, National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien said the strike on Soleimani was legally permitted under a 2002 authorization from Congress that allowed former president George W. Bush to wage war on Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi nation.
It really is 2003 all over again!
This is the article that was printed beside Pompeo's threats:
"US-led coalition halts ISIS fight as it steels for Iranian attacks" by Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Eric Schmitt New York Times, January 5, 2020
WASHINGTON — The US-led coalition in Iraq and Syria halted its campaign against the Islamic State on Sunday as US forces braced for retaliation from Iran over a strike that killed a powerful Iranian commander, military officials said.
In a statement, the US command said that after repeated attacks on Iraqi and US bases in recent weeks, one of which killed an American contractor Dec. 27, “we have therefore paused these activities, subject to continuous review.”
“We remain resolute as partners of the government of Iraq and the Iraqi people that have welcomed us into their country to help defeat ISIS,” the statement said. Using the Arabic name for the Islamic State, it added, “We remain ready to return our full attention and efforts back to our shared goal of ensuring the lasting defeat of Daesh.”
The move comes after the deaths last week of Major General Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian security and intelligence commander responsible for the deaths of hundreds of troops over the years, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a powerful Iraqi militia commander and government official, in a US drone strike outside the Baghdad airport. About 5,200 troops in Iraq and several hundred in Syria are now focused on fortifying their outposts instead of pursuing remnants of the Islamic State and training local forces.
What remains to be seen is what, exactly, Iran will do in retribution for the strike. In recent days, tens of thousands of pro-Iranian fighters took to the streets in Baghdad, chanting that “revenge is coming” to the United States.
In both Syria and Iraq, the United States has maintained an archipelago of outposts, bases, and airfields, all connected by ground and air transport routes, where small contingents of US troops are either training local forces or working alongside them to carry out counterterrorism operations against the Islamic State.
The cessation of those missions to instead focus on security is likely to allow what remains of the terrorist group to reconstitute itself in the ungoverned spaces where it flourishes, much as it did when Turkey invaded northern Syria in October. Worsening the situation, Iran-backed militias that were also fighting the Islamic State have turned their attention toward the United States.
“The fight against ISIS has been significantly degraded by the tensions between the US and Iran,” said Michael Knights, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He cited the fact that US forces have recently been excluded from ground operations and have had airspace closed to them in the battle against the terrorist group as a result of pressure on the Iraqi government from Iran-backed militias operating in the country.
One way that the US-led effort stands to be further degraded is if Special Operations forces limit their missions, he said. US troops are deployed in several joint US and Iraqi bases spread across the country, where they have been keeping pressure on resurgent ISIS cells.
The administration’s decision to suspend counterterrorism operations after the strike on Soleimani drew sharp criticism from many former intelligence and counterterrorism specialists.
“The Trump administration that promised to ‘annihilate’ ISIS has now stopped operations against ISIS to protect US troops from Iranian retaliation,” said Joshua Geltzer, who was the senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council during the Obama administration, on Twitter on Sunday. “So Trump stops addressing an existing threat to deal with one of his making.”
Other security analysts said the administration now faces an escalating multifront fight against an array of Sunni and Shi’ite violent extremists.
“The entire US mission in the Middle East is being repositioned from a specific and focused goal of defeating ISIS to an amorphous and open-ended campaign to counter Iran,” Colin Clarke, a senior fellow at the Soufan Center, a research organization for global security issues, said in an e-mail. “This will provide ISIS with the operational space needed to reconstitute its networks across Iraq and Syria. US forces will be overstretched while also becoming more attractive targets for a broad array of adversaries.”
The US military has long had plans to contend with an Iranian military incursion in the region, according to a former senior defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Those plans include moving important US assets stationed in the Middle East, such as warships and aircraft, away from possible attack points and shutting down smaller, more exposed bases, or at least withdrawing US troops from them, the official said.
Deja vu, 'eh?
Related:
"On Friday, the Pentagon announced that it was sending an additional 3,500 troops to the region, while troops in Italy were put on standby, according to defense officials. The troop escalation came just days after President Trump ordered an additional 750 US soldiers to the Middle East and 3,000 more to be on alert for future deployment....."
I counted 67,900 troops officially deployed with more on the way.
At the US Embassy in Baghdad, roughly 100 Marines who have been deployed there in recent days, along with around 3,500 paratroopers and a Special Operations unit sent to the region, are preparing for a possible attack from Iranian-backed forces. One military officer deployed to the region said an attack could include mortar and rocket fire, along with snipers.
For now, though, the atmosphere at the embassy remained relatively calm, and the Marines used only nonlethal weapons, such as tear gas, during demonstrations last week, the officer added.
Further complicating the situation, the Iraqi Parliament voted Sunday to expel US and other foreign troops from the nation. Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi is expected to sign the bill, though it includes no timetable for a withdrawal.
Although the Iraqi government declared the Islamic State defeated in December 2017 and the US-led coalition and Syrian fighters seized the group’s last swath of territory in Syria last March, ISIS fighters have continued attacks, albeit on a much smaller scale, in both countries.
In 2014, at the Islamic State’s height, it held territory roughly the size of Britain.
--more--"
Related:
US stops dozens of Iranian-Americans returning from Canada
They will let you in after the internment camps have been built.
Meanwhile, today's National lead is "an unlikely 11th-hour bid that underscores the pressure some Trump allies feel as the president stews over the impeachment delay" and the "idea could be moot in a matter of days because multiple Democratic officials expect Pelosi to transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate as soon as this week" now that she has gotten what she wanted.
All this on the heels of them caving on and approving a $738 war bill that stripped out an amendment that would have required Trump to get Congressional approval to attack Iran and which extended Patriot Act surveillance powers for a president who allegedly threatens our national security. Those actions right there show you how phony is the fake wrestling match with which the pre$$ is consumed.
That's today's top story!
BEIRUT — The consequences of the United States’ assassination of a top Iranian general rippled across the Middle East and beyond on Sunday, with Iran ending commitments it made to limit its nuclear fuel production and Iraqi lawmakers voting to expel US forces from their country.
Steeling for retaliation from Iran, a US-led coalition in Iraq and Syria suspended the campaign it has waged against the Islamic State for years, and hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the street to mourn the assassinated general, Qassem Soleimani.
Warning Iran not to attack, President Trump said the United States had pinpointed 52 targets in Iran, including cultural sites. The sites, he said, represented the 52 American hostages held at the US Embassy in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
He has become a most odious and disgusting creature, and should be removed from office right now.
Amid outrage in Iran, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif declared that “targeting cultural sites is a war crime” and predicted that the “end of US malign presence in West Asia has begun.”
Trump has said that the killing of Soleimani on Friday was aimed at preventing war, but so far, it has unleashed a host of unanticipated consequences that could dramatically alter where the United States operates. Increasingly, the killing appeared to be generating effects far beyond Washington’s ability to control.
That may include Iran’s nuclear future. So the top headline and story in today's Globe is a NYT article that is basically implying that Iran will soon be building a bomb.
It's 2003 all over again, folks, and that sucks.
On Sunday, the Iranian government said it was abandoning its “final limitations in the nuclear deal,” the international agreement intended to prevent the country from developing nuclear weapons. Iran will, however, continue its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency and return to the nuclear deal if the economic sanctions imposed on it are removed and Iran’s interests guaranteed, the government said. US sanctions have hit Iran’s oil-based economy particularly hard.
Soleimani was a towering figure both in Iran and across the Middle East, where he cultivated proxy militias in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Since he was killed in a US drone strike at the Baghdad airport Friday alongside a powerful Iraqi militia leader, Iran and its partners have launched calls for vengeance.
US allies have largely kept quiet so as not to put themselves in the line of fire.
Lawmakers in Iraq voted Sunday to require the government to end the presence of US troops in the country after the United States ordered the assassination on Iraqi soil.
The vote will not be final until it is signed by the prime minister, and it was unclear whether Iraq’s current caretaker government had the authority to end the relationship with the US military.
The NYT is acting like a solicitor-general for continued U.S. occupation.
Few doubted, however, that the country would take whatever legal actions were necessary to compel a US departure over the coming months. Asked shortly before the parliamentary vote whether the United States would comply with an Iraqi government request for American troops to leave, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo would not answer directly, saying the United States was watching the situation.
Although the vote in Parliament was 170-0, lawmakers were more divided on the issue than that tally may suggest.
It's a unanimous vote and the New York Times is telling us they are divided.
HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!
They are telling us that Sunni Muslim factions and the Kurds wanted the United States to stay, but voted leave anyway.
Why anyone would believe anything in the New York Times these days is beyond me.
The legislation threads a fine needle: While using strong language demanding that the government “end any foreign presence on Iraqi soil and prevent the use of Iraqi airspace, soil, and water for any reason” by foreign forces, it gives no timetable for doing so.
It would end the mission approved in 2014 that gave the United States the explicit task of helping Iraqi forces fight the Islamic State. That agreement gave the Americans substantial latitude to launch attacks and use Iraqi airspace, but the measure would leave in place the Strategic Framework Agreement, which allows a US troop presence in Iraq in some form, although only “at the invitation of the Iraqi government.”
Yeah, the 2014 agreement came after Obama withdrew in 2011 and after the rise of ISIS.
Hmmmmm!
On Sunday, the US-led coalition in Iraq and Syria said that it would pause its yearslong mission of fighting the Islamic State and training local forces in both countries.
A pullout of the estimated 5,200 US troops in Iraq could cripple the fight against the Islamic State, or ISIS, and allow its resurgence.
You just shake your head at this blatant propaganda.
A smaller contingent of about 1,000 US troops are in eastern Syria.
As the Middle East braced for Iranian retaliation, which analysts said was all but inevitable and US officials said they expected within weeks.....
Meaning the false flags are coming.
--more--"
This article appeared below that one on the inside of the paper:
"US allies in Mideast fear they may pay a price for Soleimani killing" by Ben Hubbard New York Times, January 5, 2020
BEIRUT — Many in the region hate Iran for what they see as its efforts to build Shiite militias to advance its interests and undermine Arab states in a majority-Sunni region. That left many pleased, privately at least, the United States had killed Major General Qassem Soleimani, the mastermind of Iran’s regional efforts and the most visible face of that project.
Khalid al-Dakhil, a political sociologist in Saudi Arabia, criticized Iran for selling itself to the Arabs as the head of “the resistance” — the regional struggle against the United States and Israel — when it has expended more effort in recent years amassing power in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. “What kind of a resistance is this?” he said.
Phony Democratic Party resistance?
Of course, we know which side the Saudis are on.
While many Persian Gulf leaders agree, they have not publicly praised Soleimani’s killing.
“Saudi Arabia and all the Gulf countries are just quiet,” al-Dakhil said. “They don’t want to antagonize the Iranians, because the situation in the region is so delicate, so divided, so sensitive, that you don’t want to stir it up further.”
Prince Khalid bin Salman, the Saudi deputy defense minister, flew to Washington this weekend for consultations. On Saturday, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, foreign minister of Qatar, met with his Iranian counterpart in Tehran.
That was part of the deescalation plan and possible peace proposal that Trump obliterated with his drone assassination.
Exacerbating the nervousness in the Gulf are questions about the extent of the support countries can expect from Trump should they become the target of Iranian retaliation, be it military action, a cyberattack, or sabotage, said Barbara Leaf, a former US ambassador to the United Arab Emirates now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Hey, there they are again!
That's where the printed copy ended.
The situation is also complex for American allies in countries where the United States competes for influence with Iran.
In Syria, rebels, activists, and exiles who oppose the government of President Bashar Assad rejoiced at news of Soleimani’s killing, since they held him responsible for backing Assad’s military, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people, but the United States gave up on the effort to remove Assad from power years ago, and Syrian Kurds, a US ally in the battle against the Islamic State, have no idea how long the United States will stick around.
I don't think they have given up on regime change in Syria; in fact, this appears to be part of that.
As for U.S. troops sticking around, I wouldn't worry. We never leave.
In Iraq, where the United States has invested thousands of lives and billions of dollars, few thanked it publicly for killing Soleimani, who oversaw the expansion of Iranian influence there, primarily though ties to the country’s Shiites. Even Kurds and Sunnis who may prefer the United States to Iran kept quiet to avoid provoking their Shiite compatriots and their powerful militias.
In Lebanon, American allies were also keeping quiet to avoid provoking pro-Iran forces there. Soleimani was key to the growth of Hezbollah into a major political party and the country’s strongest military force.
Even Israel remained notably restrained. For Israelis, Soleimani was an arch foe and practically a household name, having surrounded the country with hostile proxy forces armed with tens of thousands of rockets and missiles. His name was associated with a quarter-century of attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets abroad, but Israeli celebrations were muted amid concerns that Israel could end up a target for Iranian retaliation. Israeli officials also wanted to avoid any suggestion of involvement in the Soleimani killing.....
That last paragraph is so revealing. It tells you who really did this, or on whose behalf Trump did this. Thus it must be kept from the American people.
--more--"
They also talked to a senior fellow at the foundation New America who works in the Persian Gulf.
"Pompeo warns Iran that US could attack if Tehran retaliates" by Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Edward Wong New York Times, January 5, 2020
Oh, New York Times again.
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned Iran on Sunday that the United States could attack the country within its borders and its leaders if they take hostile actions.
Then it is a war of aggression.
“I’ve been part of the discussion and planning process — everything I’ve seen about how we will respond with great force and great vigor if the Iranian leadership makes a bad decision,” Pompeo said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We hope that they won’t, but when they do, America will respond.
“We will be bold in protecting American interests, and we’ll do so in a way that’s consistent with the rule of law,” he added.
So says the official from a lawless and rogue regime.
In appearances on six television news shows Sunday morning, Pompeo underscored President Trump’s message the previous day that the United States had chosen sites to attack within Iran if the country ordered assaults on US assets or citizens in retaliation for Soleimani’s death.
Oh, Pompeo was out there doing public relations and damage control.
Trump wrote on Twitter that the United States had picked 52 sites, “some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture,” that “WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.”
The targeting of cultural sites is against international law, and critics denounced Trump for his statement.
When asked Sunday by several interviewers whether the United States would attack cultural sites, Pompeo avoided answering directly. He said on ABC’s “This Week” that the United States would “behave lawfully” and “behave inside the system.”
You can impeach his obese ass, too, 'kay?!
After those verbatim paragraphs, the web version of the story melds with the accompanying printed article next door:
The US-led coalition in Iraq and Syria halted its campaign against the Islamic State on Sunday as US forces braced for retaliation from Iran over a strike that killed a powerful Iranian commander, military officials said.
In a statement, the US command said that after repeated attacks on Iraqi and US bases in recent weeks, one of which killed an American contractor Dec. 27, “we have therefore paused these activities, subject to continuous review.”
“We remain resolute as partners of the government of Iraq and the Iraqi people that have welcomed us into their country to help defeat ISIS,” the statement said. Using the Arabic name for the Islamic State, it added, “We remain ready to return our full attention and efforts back to our shared goal of ensuring the lasting defeat of Daesh.”
Oh, yeah?
When?
Did they ask us to invade?
What if they say we are no longer welcome?
The move comes after the deaths last week of Major General Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian security and intelligence commander responsible for the deaths of hundreds of troops over the years, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a powerful Iraqi militia commander and government official, in a US drone strike outside the Baghdad airport. About 5,200 troops in Iraq and several hundred in Syria are now focused on fortifying their outposts instead of pursuing remnants of the Islamic State and training local forces.
What remains to be seen is what, exactly, Iran will do in retribution for the strike. In recent days, tens of thousands of pro-Iranian fighters took to the streets in Baghdad, chanting that “revenge is coming” to the United States.
In both Syria and Iraq, the United States has maintained an archipelago of outposts, bases, and airfields, all connected by ground and air transport routes, where small contingents of US troops are either training local forces or working alongside them to carry out counterterrorism operations against the Islamic State.
The cessation of those missions to instead focus on security is likely to allow what remains of the terrorist group to reconstitute itself in the ungoverned spaces where it flourishes, much as it did when Turkey invaded northern Syria in October. Iranian-backed militias had been an ally in the fight against the Islamic State. Such groups have now turned their attention toward the United States.
“The fight against ISIS has been significantly degraded by the tensions between the US and Iran,” said Michael Knights, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He cited the fact that US forces have recently been excluded from ground operations and have had airspace closed to them in the battle against the terrorist group as a result of pressure on the Iraqi government from Iran-backed militias operating in the country.
Once again, the NYT turns to WINEP!
One way that the US-led effort stands to be further degraded is if Special Operations forces limit their missions, he said. US troops are deployed in several joint US and Iraqi bases spread across the country, where they have been keeping pressure on resurgent ISIS cells.
The administration’s decision to suspend counterterrorism operations after the strike on Soleimani drew sharp criticism from many former intelligence and counterterrorism specialists.
“The Trump administration that promised to ‘annihilate’ ISIS has now stopped operations against ISIS to protect US troops from Iranian retaliation,” said Joshua Geltzer, who was the senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council during the Obama administration, on Twitter on Sunday. “So Trump stops addressing an existing threat to deal with one of his making.”
Who do they turn to?
A Jew who used to work for Obama talking about self-created threats -- like ISIS!
Anyone with half a brain or a cognizant memory can recognize this regurgitated war propaganda and who is behind it.
Other security analysts said the administration now faces an escalating multifront fight against an array of Sunni and Shi’ite violent extremists.
“The entire US mission in the Middle East is being repositioned from a specific and focused goal of defeating ISIS to an amorphous and open-ended campaign to counter Iran,” Colin Clarke, a senior fellow at the Soufan Center, a research organization for global security issues, said in an e-mail. “This will provide ISIS with the operational space needed to reconstitute its networks across Iraq and Syria. US forces will be overstretched while also becoming more attractive targets for a broad array of adversaries.”
I have no idea who is he or what is the Soufan Center; however, it looks like the same old kind of stink tank that makes one think.
The US military has long had plans to contend with an Iranian military incursion in the region, according to a former senior defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Those plans include moving important US assets stationed in the Middle East, such as warships and aircraft, away from possible attack points and shutting down smaller, more exposed bases, or at least withdrawing US troops from them.
Those last two paragraphs let you know that this has been the plan all along. The PNAC plan is in place and almost near completion. Claiming the plans are to withdraw is laughable in the face of increased forces being sent to the region. I don't know who they think is buying their BS.
Meanwhile, the web version kept these small, somewhat rewritten passages:
Iran, meanwhile, said Sunday it would limit its response to US military targets. ‘‘The response for sure will be military and against military sites,’’ Hossein Dehghan, the military adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, said in an interview with CNN.
Thus any attacks against U.S. civilian targets can be considered false flags.
--more--"
What my print article contained was Trump saying on Twitter that his response to any retaliation with Iran may be disproportionate before detailing Pompeo's ma$$ media appearances and Rand Paul's criticism. The Times then brought up the nuclear deal, a deal Kerry literally broke a leg for, with other nations urging Iran to continue to abide by the deal as Trump's tweeting has united Iranians.
The end of the article said that the the executive branch has an open-ended war authorization from Congress in 2001 to go after Al Qaeda and partner groups in retaliation for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that some members of Congress and some senior administration officials are making the case that the 2001 authorization could encompass Iran because of ties to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and on Friday, National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien said the strike on Soleimani was legally permitted under a 2002 authorization from Congress that allowed former president George W. Bush to wage war on Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi nation.
It really is 2003 all over again!
This is the article that was printed beside Pompeo's threats:
"US-led coalition halts ISIS fight as it steels for Iranian attacks" by Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Eric Schmitt New York Times, January 5, 2020
WASHINGTON — The US-led coalition in Iraq and Syria halted its campaign against the Islamic State on Sunday as US forces braced for retaliation from Iran over a strike that killed a powerful Iranian commander, military officials said.
In a statement, the US command said that after repeated attacks on Iraqi and US bases in recent weeks, one of which killed an American contractor Dec. 27, “we have therefore paused these activities, subject to continuous review.”
“We remain resolute as partners of the government of Iraq and the Iraqi people that have welcomed us into their country to help defeat ISIS,” the statement said. Using the Arabic name for the Islamic State, it added, “We remain ready to return our full attention and efforts back to our shared goal of ensuring the lasting defeat of Daesh.”
The move comes after the deaths last week of Major General Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian security and intelligence commander responsible for the deaths of hundreds of troops over the years, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a powerful Iraqi militia commander and government official, in a US drone strike outside the Baghdad airport. About 5,200 troops in Iraq and several hundred in Syria are now focused on fortifying their outposts instead of pursuing remnants of the Islamic State and training local forces.
What remains to be seen is what, exactly, Iran will do in retribution for the strike. In recent days, tens of thousands of pro-Iranian fighters took to the streets in Baghdad, chanting that “revenge is coming” to the United States.
In both Syria and Iraq, the United States has maintained an archipelago of outposts, bases, and airfields, all connected by ground and air transport routes, where small contingents of US troops are either training local forces or working alongside them to carry out counterterrorism operations against the Islamic State.
The cessation of those missions to instead focus on security is likely to allow what remains of the terrorist group to reconstitute itself in the ungoverned spaces where it flourishes, much as it did when Turkey invaded northern Syria in October. Worsening the situation, Iran-backed militias that were also fighting the Islamic State have turned their attention toward the United States.
“The fight against ISIS has been significantly degraded by the tensions between the US and Iran,” said Michael Knights, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He cited the fact that US forces have recently been excluded from ground operations and have had airspace closed to them in the battle against the terrorist group as a result of pressure on the Iraqi government from Iran-backed militias operating in the country.
One way that the US-led effort stands to be further degraded is if Special Operations forces limit their missions, he said. US troops are deployed in several joint US and Iraqi bases spread across the country, where they have been keeping pressure on resurgent ISIS cells.
The administration’s decision to suspend counterterrorism operations after the strike on Soleimani drew sharp criticism from many former intelligence and counterterrorism specialists.
“The Trump administration that promised to ‘annihilate’ ISIS has now stopped operations against ISIS to protect US troops from Iranian retaliation,” said Joshua Geltzer, who was the senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council during the Obama administration, on Twitter on Sunday. “So Trump stops addressing an existing threat to deal with one of his making.”
Other security analysts said the administration now faces an escalating multifront fight against an array of Sunni and Shi’ite violent extremists.
“The entire US mission in the Middle East is being repositioned from a specific and focused goal of defeating ISIS to an amorphous and open-ended campaign to counter Iran,” Colin Clarke, a senior fellow at the Soufan Center, a research organization for global security issues, said in an e-mail. “This will provide ISIS with the operational space needed to reconstitute its networks across Iraq and Syria. US forces will be overstretched while also becoming more attractive targets for a broad array of adversaries.”
The US military has long had plans to contend with an Iranian military incursion in the region, according to a former senior defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Those plans include moving important US assets stationed in the Middle East, such as warships and aircraft, away from possible attack points and shutting down smaller, more exposed bases, or at least withdrawing US troops from them, the official said.
Deja vu, 'eh?
Related:
"On Friday, the Pentagon announced that it was sending an additional 3,500 troops to the region, while troops in Italy were put on standby, according to defense officials. The troop escalation came just days after President Trump ordered an additional 750 US soldiers to the Middle East and 3,000 more to be on alert for future deployment....."
I counted 67,900 troops officially deployed with more on the way.
At the US Embassy in Baghdad, roughly 100 Marines who have been deployed there in recent days, along with around 3,500 paratroopers and a Special Operations unit sent to the region, are preparing for a possible attack from Iranian-backed forces. One military officer deployed to the region said an attack could include mortar and rocket fire, along with snipers.
For now, though, the atmosphere at the embassy remained relatively calm, and the Marines used only nonlethal weapons, such as tear gas, during demonstrations last week, the officer added.
Further complicating the situation, the Iraqi Parliament voted Sunday to expel US and other foreign troops from the nation. Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi is expected to sign the bill, though it includes no timetable for a withdrawal.
Although the Iraqi government declared the Islamic State defeated in December 2017 and the US-led coalition and Syrian fighters seized the group’s last swath of territory in Syria last March, ISIS fighters have continued attacks, albeit on a much smaller scale, in both countries.
In 2014, at the Islamic State’s height, it held territory roughly the size of Britain.
--more--"
Related:
US stops dozens of Iranian-Americans returning from Canada
They will let you in after the internment camps have been built.
Meanwhile, today's National lead is "an unlikely 11th-hour bid that underscores the pressure some Trump allies feel as the president stews over the impeachment delay" and the "idea could be moot in a matter of days because multiple Democratic officials expect Pelosi to transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate as soon as this week" now that she has gotten what she wanted.
All this on the heels of them caving on and approving a $738 war bill that stripped out an amendment that would have required Trump to get Congressional approval to attack Iran and which extended Patriot Act surveillance powers for a president who allegedly threatens our national security. Those actions right there show you how phony is the fake wrestling match with which the pre$$ is consumed.
