RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/480649-washington-needs-to-anticipate-irans-next-provocation

Signs are mounting that in Tehran, which faces rising pressures at home and abroad, the country’s powerful hardline conservatives are circling the wagons, raising the odds of still more Iranian global provocations. The question is whether Washington – which continues to tighten the economic screws on Tehran – is ready for what might come next.

In the latest conservative effort to solidify power, the country’s Guardian Council recently barred 9,500 prospective candidates (almost two-thirds of the 14,500 prospective candidates) in next month’s parliamentary elections, from running. The 12-member Guardian Council – an unelected body that includes six designees of the nation’s ultimate authority, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei – routinely bars hundreds if not thousands of would-be candidates from elections because they’re not conservative enough or committed enough to the regime’s revolutionary goals. This time, however, the barred candidates include nearly a third of the current parliament. The signal was clear. The Council not only wants to prevent new reformist candidates from winning office; it also wants to purge the parliament of members it considers too moderate.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/02/10/must-america-be-in-the-middle-east/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Yes, but the strategic considerations have changed

Since World War II, the United States has identified a number of national interests in the Greater Middle East, a region often defined quite loosely as the Arab nations (including those of North Africa), Israel, and sometimes Turkey, as well as Iran, the Horn of Africa countries, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

During the Cold War period, from 1946 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, American bipartisan foreign policy identified a strategic need for the region’s petroleum. Gulf oil was seen as critical in augmenting America’s own seemingly finite supply or ensuring the free world’s access to it. Thus was born the post-war U.S. realist interest in the Middle East — a region that after the 15th-century discovery of the New World lost the strategic global position it had held since classical antiquity.

The United States backed most prominently the House of Saud and neighboring Persian Gulf monarchies and dictatorships on the rationale that they would endlessly pump oil and sell it to the West at a fair price. British Petroleum enjoyed a more or less controlling oil interest in Iran, and U.S. oil companies had a free hand in Saudi Arabia; both nations maneuvered with other regimes to develop oil-exporting industries. The ensuing conspiracy theories, coups, and succession scraps of Arab and Persian strongmen fueled a half century of “Great Satan” chanting and the burning of American flags on the Middle East street.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/trump_had_soleimani_in_his_crosshairs_for_a_long_time.html

Following the terrorist Qassem Soleimani’s death on President Trump’s orders, the media and the Democrat party have been like trapped rats, desperately rushing around to show that Trump is the bad guy in all this. They’ve played up WWIII, shared the Mullahs’ grief over the loss of their pet terrorist, and blamed Trump for the Iranian decision to shoot down a passenger plane that had left Tehran minutes before and only four hours after Iran sent 15 ballistic missiles at Iraqi bases housing American troops. With all those stories falling flat (and with Iranians in an uproar against their government for shooting down the plane), the media narrative is shifting to denigrating Trump’s decision-making.

One of the first lies the media told was that Trump totally flummoxed his national security team when he elected to order a strike against Soleimani:

When President Donald Trump’s national security team came to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Monday, they weren’t expecting him to approve an operation to kill Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had gone to Palm Beach, Fla., to brief Trump on airstrikes the Pentagon had just carried out in Iraq and Syria against Iranian-sponsored Shiite militia groups.

One briefing slide shown to Trump listed several follow-up steps the U.S. could take, among them targeting Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force, according to a senior U.S. official familiar with the discussions who was not authorized to talk about the meeting on the record.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/qasem-soleimani-strike-president-trump-has-constitution-precedent-on-his-side/

It’s legal to kill an enemy in combat, and Soleimani was clearly escalating his attacks on U.S. forces.

In ordering a strike on Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, President Donald Trump re-opened questions about targeting those abroad who would harm Americans. “No one should shed a tear,” in Senator Chuck Schumer’s words, over the death of the Qods Force leader, who was responsible for the killing of hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq. Nevertheless, critics worry that the killing of Soleimani, one of the military leaders closest to Iran’s religious leaders, could spark an escalatory spiral of attacks and lead to a broader war in the Middle East.

Putting aside the policy of the attacks, Trump critics have raised doubts about the legality of the strike. Shortly after news broke on Thursday night of the attack, Senator Chris Murphy (D., Conn.), while conceding that Soleimani was “an enemy of the United States,” tweeted: “The question is this — as reports suggest, did America just assassinate, without any congressional authorization, the second most powerful person in Iran, knowingly setting off a potential massive regional war?”

Killing Soleimani without “involving Congress raises serious legal problems and is an affront to Congress’s powers as a coequal branch of government,” said House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot L. Engel (D., N.Y.). “The law requires notification so the President can’t plunge the United States into ill-considered wars.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/death-to-america-iran-philosophy-for-40-years/

“Nothing else has gotten the United States to the point it desires — where the Iranian regime either drops “Death to America” as a slogan, a goal, and a philosophy, or everyone can genuinely rest assured that it is merely rote agitprop. The strike on Soleimani was something new — an experiment of sorts to see if it can generate the results that 40 years of other approaches have failed to generate. Let’s all hope that a new spirit of caution and prudence takes root in Tehran.”

For 40 years, Tehran’s philosophy has been simple and direct: ‘Death to America!’

S ince 1979, no one in the United States has figured out a good way to handle the regime in Tehran. For 40 years, we’ve been having the same arguments, and no matter what we tried, the results were disappointing.

It is hard to overstate just how spectacularly unprepared the U.S. government was for the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The House Intelligence Committee revealed in a January 1979 report that two CIA long-term analyses written in the late 1970s had left policymakers with the impression that the rule of American-aligned Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was stable and strong. The House report cited a 60-page study from August 1977, titled “Iran in the 1980s,” that predicted that “the Shah will be an active participant in Iranian life well into the 1980s” and “there will be no radical change in Iranian political behavior in the near future.” The House also cited the CIA’s separate assessment in 1978, in its report titled “Iran After the Shah,” that “Iran is not in a revolutionary situation or even a ‘pre-revolutionary’ situation.”

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.