Trump's Order to Assassinate Qasem Soleimani Has Kicked Over the Hornet's Nest
Trump's Order to Assassinate Qasem Soleimani Has Kicked Over the Hornet's Nest
We are hearing the echoes of 2002 and 2003 rising again after the president ordered the assassination of Iran's second most powerful man.
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
JAN 3, 2020
Three years ago, El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, like 99.99 percent of his fellow citizens, did not have the faintest idea what the Quds Force was, and he wouldn’t have known who the hell Qasem Soleimani was if the man sat in his lap. In the aftermath of his astonishingly reckless decision to take Soleimani out on Thursday, a number of the president*’s previous public statements have been unearthed. Many of them were ancient warnings that Barack Obama intended to start a war with Iran in order to be re-elected in 2012. These are further proof enough of his bone-deep mendacity, but more compelling was a radio interview he did with Hugh Hewitt while running for president himself four years later....
So here, as 2020 begins, the president* launches a unilateral military action to kill the second-most important figure in the Iranian government, the man who commanded the forces that the president* previously confused with our allies, the Kurds, whom he previously sold out on the battlefield. So no, I have absolutely no confidence that the American government as it is currently run has the vaguest idea what to do next....
Instead, the president* tweeted out the image of an American flag. An official Pentagon briefing pointedly said that the action had been taken at the order of the president*. The State Department warned Americans to get the hell out of Iraq, but not to come to the massive American embassy. Americans are urged to leave by airplane if possible but, if necessary, to escape by land, although where the hell they’re supposed to go—Syria?—was left unexplained. But the Americans should get out of Iraq, a place that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told CNN on Friday morning is safer now that Soleimani is dead....
The stated policy of this administration* is the utter disruption of the Iranian government as a prelude to regime change. We tried this in the 1950s and Iran got 20 years of a police state. Does anyone seriously believe that an Iranian regime that rises from American policy will have the faintest credibility with most Iranians? We tried that in Iraq, which is why Qasem Soleiman found such a target-rich environment there. And any split in the current Iranian regime over the now-abandoned nuclear deal likely has been smoothed over. And god only knows what will happen in Iraq as a result of this. This policy is kick-over-the-hornet’s-nest at its worst. Maybe it’s all just to keep John Bolton from testifying to the Senate. That’s as good an explanation as any.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a30389099/iran-qasem-soleimani-assassinated-trump/
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