RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/opinion/trump-iran-suleimani-assassination-b

More than any other American military operation since the invasion of Iraq, the assassination yesterday of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Qods Force of its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, is a seismic event. The killings of Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leaders of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, were certainly meaningful, but they were also largely symbolic, because their organizations had been mostly destroyed. Taking out the architect of the Islamic Republic’s decades-long active campaign of violence against the United States and its allies, especially Israel, represents a tectonic shift in Middle Eastern politics.

To see just how significant Mr. Suleimani’s death truly is, it helps to understand the geopolitical game he’d devoted his life to playing. In Lebanon, Mr. Suleimani built Lebanese Hezbollah into the powerful state within a state that we know today. A terrorist organization receiving its funds, arms and marching orders from Tehran, Hezbollah has a missile arsenal larger than that of most countries in the region. The group’s success has been astounding, helping to cement Iran’s influence not just in Lebanon but farther around the Arab world.

Building up on this successful experience, Mr. Suleimani spent the last decade replicating the Hezbollah model in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, propping up local militias with precision weapons and tactical know-how. In Syria, his forces have allied with Russia to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad, a project that, in practice, has meant driving over 10 million people from their homes and killing well over half a million. In Iraq, as we have seen in recent days, Mr. Suleimani’s militias ride roughshod over the legitimate state institutions. They rose to power, of course, after participating in an insurgency, of which he was the architect, against American and coalition forces. Hundreds of American soldiers lost their lives to the weapons that the Qods Force provided to its Iraqi proxies.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/05/what-is-the-middle-east-in-the-middle-of-anymore/

The United States is trying to square a circle, remaining strong and deterring dangerous elements, but to do so for U.S. interests—interests that increasingly seem to be fewer and fewer in the Middle East.

Since World War II, the United States has been involved in a series of crises and wars in the Middle East on the premise of protecting U.S., Western, or global interests, or purportedly all three combined. Since antiquity, the Middle East has been the hub of three continents, and of three great religions, and the maritime intersection between East and West.

In modern times American strategic concerns in no particular order were usually the following:

1) Guaranteeing reliable oil supplies for the U.S. economy.

2) Ensuring that no hostile power—most notably the Soviet Union between 1946-1989 and local Arab or Iranian strongmen thereafter—gained control of the Middle East and used its wealth and oil power to disrupt the economies and security of the Western world, Europe in particular.

3) Preventing radical Islamic terrorists from carving out sanctuaries and bases of operations to attack the United States or its close allies.

4) Aiding Israel to survive in a hostile neighborhood.

5) Keeping shipping lanes in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, and the Persian Gulf open and accessible to world commerce at the historical nexus of three continents.

6) To the extent we could articulate our interests, U.S. policy was reductionist and simply deterred any other major power for any reason from dominating the quite distant region.

7) Occasionally the United States sought to limit or stop the endemic bloodletting of the region.

Those various reasons explain why we tended to intervene in nasty places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, and Syria. Yet despite the sometimes humanitarian pretenses about our inventions in the Middle East, we should remember that we most certainly did not go commensurately into central Africa or South America to prevent mass killings, genocides, or gruesome civil wars.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/01/donald-trump-takes-out-the-trash/

Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) has just found another level of muddle and madness. I refer to the aftermath of the targeted assassination of Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Iran’s Quds Forces, the foreign legion division of Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on January 3. The problem with TDS is that it diminishes critical-thinking skills which means, paradoxically, groupthink is embraced without a skerrick of critical thinking. All we have are facts in the face of their fanaticism, and for that reason let us unemotionally consider the specifics of President Trump’s first televised explanation for terminating Soleimani. As Don McLean would say: “They would not listen/they do not know how/Perhaps they’ll listen now.”

The theme of President Trump’s rationale was this: “We took action last night to stop a war. We did not take action to start a war.” Whether or not this turns out to be true, let us at least recognise that Donald Trump’s thinking on foreign policy hardly fits the pattern of a warmonger, in the Middle East or anywhere else for that matter.

The “AP Fact Check” brings up the furphy that Donald Trump, then a private citizen, was for the Second Iraq War before he was against it, and yet all there is to this is a throwaway line, spoken on September 11, 2002, in response to a question about whether he would support a prospective invasion of Iraq: “Yeah, I guess so.” He also made a comment, in the context of America’s initial victory over Saddam Hussein’s army, that it “looks like a tremendous success from a military standpoint”.

Only after March 2003, according to the AP Fact Checker, did Trump become an outspoken critic of the Iraq War. What was intended as a brutal takedown of President Trump’s public statements by journalist Hope Yen shows something different. Before entering the White House, Trump exhibited little appetite for war. Not exactly in the Bernie Sanders category, to be sure, but definitely subdued. Donald Trump’s shortage of warmongery could just have easily been the basis of Hope Yen’s article. My own Quadrant Online Fact Check reveals, not so surprisingly, that the widely syndicated Hope Yen herself suffers from TDS. Her monomaniacal mission to disparage President Trump at every turn, never allowing any positive aspect of the man to see the light of day, is thinly disguised as “fact checking”.