The Trump administration drastically escalated the US regime’s ongoing conflict with Iran by ordering the execution of Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani with an airstrike on the Baghdad International Airport.
It takes what was arguably already a war (with an economic blockade and regular skirmishes with Iranian proxy forces) to a straight-up shooting war.
Yes, he was involved in a lot of bloody wars — but so was every American president since 2000, and besides half the wars he fought in were started or fueled by the United States. It’s just another instance of America’s gigantic hypocrisy when it comes to war.
Soleimani was no ordinary general. He was more like a cross between the American vice president and the secretary of state — one of the two or three most famous and powerful people in Iran behind Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Soleimani commanded the Quds Force, a Special Forces-type operation supporting Iranian allies in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and many other countries. American hardliners hate him mainly for supporting Hezbollah and Hamas, and for arming insurgents who fought the American occupation of Iraq.
So yes, Soleimani has fueled a lot of nasty conflicts and killed a lot of people, directly or indirectly, many of them American soldiers in the Middle East.
It’s worth noting also that much of his recent effort has been dedicated to fighting ISIS (with great effectiveness, by all accounts) in a tacit uneasy alliance with U.S. forces.
Yet even the worst of Soleimani’s record pales in comparison with the most blood-drenched American warmongers.
If Soleimani deserves condemnation for arming Iraqi insurgents, then George W. Bush and Dick Cheney deserve 10 times as much for starting the war in the first place.
It was a pointless, illegal war of aggression sold on lies that obliterated Iraqi society and killed perhaps half a million people, almost all of them innocent civilians.
If Soleimani deserves blame for helping Bashar al-Assad defeat Syrian rebels, Henry Kissinger deserves 10 times as much for orchestrating the bombing slaughter of perhaps a quarter million Cambodians and paving the way for the Khmer Rouge genocide that killed 1.7 million people.
The reality is that the lumbering American colossus has unleashed a Thirty Years’ War-level of violent chaos all around Iran for no good reason at all.
Nothing deflates the hysterically macho chest-thumping self-image of American warmongers than the fact that for the last decade and more the signature U.S. method of killing people has been a robot plus a gamer in a box 10,000 miles away.
Raining down drone missiles on a guy in plain sight at a civilian airport — built at vast expense with U.S. money, by the way — just drives the cowardice home further.
The Week / ABC Flash Point News 2020.
Hypocrisy as their Diplomacy?
Al always.