It Could Not Be Otherwise

Chris Hedges sees horrific consequences following Donald Trump's assassination of  Qassem Soleimani:

The assassination by the United States of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, near Baghdad’s airport will ignite widespread retaliatory attacks against U.S. targets from Shiites, who form the majority in Iraq. It will activate Iranian-backed militias and insurgents in Lebanon and Syria and throughout the Middle East. The existing mayhem, violence, failed states and war, the result of nearly two decades of U.S. blunders and miscalculations in the region, will become an even wider and more dangerous conflagration. The consequences are ominous. Not only will the U.S. swiftly find itself under siege in Iraq and perhaps driven out of the country—there is only a paltry force of 5,200 U.S. troops in Iraq, all U.S. citizens in Iraq have been told to leave the country “immediately” and the embassy and consular services have been closed—but the situation could also draw us into a war directly with Iran. The American Empire, it seems, will die not with a whimper but a bang.

The United States has left Iraq in ruins:

Iraq after our 2003 invasion and occupation has been destroyed as a unified country. Its once-modern infrastructure is in ruins. Electrical and water services are, at best, erratic. There is high unemployment and discontent over widespread government corruption that has led to bloody street protests. Warring militias and ethnic factions have carved out competing and antagonistic enclaves. At the same time, the war in Afghanistan is lost, as the Afghanistan Papers published by The Washington Post detail. Libya is a failed state. Yemen after five years of unrelenting Saudi airstrikes and a blockade is enduring one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. The “moderate” rebels we funded and armed in Syria at a cost of $500 million, after instigating a lawless reign of terror, have been beaten and driven out of the country. The monetary cost for this military folly, the greatest strategic blunder in American history, is between $5 trillion and $7 trillion.

But why declare war on Iran? The answer, he writes, is that The United States needs a scapegoat for the chaos and destruction it has released in the region:

Why go to war with Iran? Why walk away from a nuclear agreement that Iran did not violate? Why demonize a government that is the mortal enemy of the Taliban, along with other jihadist groups, including al-Qaida and Islamic State? Why shatter the de facto alliance we have with Iran in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why further destabilize a region already dangerously volatile?

The generals and politicians who launched and prosecuted these wars are not about to take the blame for the quagmires they created. They need a scapegoat. It is Iran. The hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed, including at least 200,000 civilians, and the millions driven from their homes into displacement and refugee camps cannot, they insist, be the result of our failed and misguided policies. The proliferation of radical jihadist groups and militias, many of which we initially trained and armed, along with the continued worldwide terrorist attacks, have to be someone else’s fault. The generals, the CIA, the private contractors and weapons manufacturers who have grown rich off these conflicts, the politicians such as George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, along with all the “experts” and celebrity pundits who serve as cheerleaders for endless war, have convinced themselves, and want to convince us, that Iran is responsible for our catastrophe.

The chaos and instability we unleashed in the Middle East, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, left Iran as the dominant country in the region. Washington empowered its nemesis. It has no idea how to reverse its mistake other than to attack Iran.

When an Ignoramus-in-Chief sits in the White House, it could not be otherwise.

Image: eldiarioexterior.com

He'll Get Burned

Qaseem Soleimani had lots of blood on his hands. Max Boot writes:

He has the blood of hundreds of Americans and thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of Arabs on his hands. [But] Soleimani was not the leader of a stateless terrorist organization. He was one of the most powerful figures in the Iranian government. His death makes him the highest-ranking foreign military commander assassinated by the United States since the shoot-down in 1943 of an airplane carrying Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack.

This is precisely the kind of crisis that many feared Donald Trump would blunder his way into:

The death of Soleimani, contrary to a Pentagon news release, was a hardly a “decisive” action — and, contrary to what Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told CNN on Friday, it will not necessarily make Americans safer. Indeed, the fact that the State Department is telling all Americans to evacuate Iraq suggests otherwise.

Charles de Gaulle supposedly said, “The graveyards are full of indispensable men.” Soleimani was perhaps the most important man in the Middle East, but even he can be replaced. Indeed, Iran has already appointed his deputy to fill his position, although it remains to be seen if the little-known Brig. Gen. Ismail Qaani will be as effective. The history of decapitation strikes — such as Israel’s 1992 killing of Hezbollah Secretary General Abbas al-Musawi or the joint U.S.-Israeli operation to kill Hezbollah military chief Imad Mughniyah in 2008 — suggests that they seldom debilitate the targeted organization and sometimes backfire. Musawi’s death, for example, led to the emergence of Hasan Nasrallah, an even more dangerous leader.

Israel has been assassinating its enemies for decades; but it doesn't claim responsibility for those assassinations. Trump -- who has always been a publicity hog -- is different:

By neither confirming nor denying responsibility, Israel gives itself plausible deniability and its enemies an off-ramp from further escalation. That is not Trump’s way. The Pentagon news release on Thursday night specified that Soleimani’s death was ordered “at the direction of the President.” This further increases the pressure on Iran to retaliate, as its leaders have repeatedly vowed to do.

The fat is in the fire. Somehow Donald Trump -- and his country -- will get burned.

Image: PEOPLE.com