This is Friedman at his worst. He is often innovative and insightful but this is really trashy. He seems to be in some kind of myopic time machine.
Obama and company offered an olive branch to the Iranians, and Mr. Trump cast it into the Ocean wide or maybe the lake at Mar a Lago. So what is Friedman talking about?Suleimani helped to defeat Isis- something that the mighty USA apparently could not do on its own - so how does this amount to incompetence? On the contrary his techniques on assymetrical proxy warfare may be second to none, and should be studied by the American military along with Sun Tzu's "Art of War" - still studied by the US military to date. They could then use it to protect us from the likes of ISiS and others.
We just dodged the bullet but it is doubtful that this is the end of the matter. In the annals of modern Iranian history the assassination would be as momentous as the US overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian government in the 1950s - and probably moreso.
On Sunday, January 5, 2020, Cornelius Hamelberg <corneliushamelberg@gmail.com> wrote:
--As all the war historians know, "In war, truth is the first casualty" – so on the brink of Trump's most precipitous mistake to date that's causing so much international outrage, it's not surprising that we will be swamped by a deluge of dumb-ass propaganda such as this apologia which starts with an erroneous vilification and demonisation of their enemy as " the dumbest man in Iran and the most overrated strategist in the Middle East: Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani."
The Iranians are generally smart people, so it's impossible that Iran would appoint an idiot as its chief of staff. If Iran's great general Qasem Soleimani was indeed at all dumb or that dumb, then why was he so feared that Trump, when given several alternatives on how to respond to US problems in Iraq, made the dumbest-ass choice of killing Soleimani - a mistake which is going to cost him his presidency, not to mention his own personal peace of mind and tranquillity. Make no mistake, it's Sami'Allahu liman hamidah and indeed there are millions of Muslims – and some of the Bible Belt Democrats too, praying for Trump's speedy demise after which they will thank the Lord: Good riddance!
I might do so later, but right now, I'm not going to exert any energy in going on to refute the rest of what this mercenary has written to justify Trump's fear, arrogance and in this case what he sees as Trump's brilliance, although he sobers up a little in his last five paragraphs, beginning with this little confession: "I have no idea whether this was wise or what will be the long-term implications."- about a commander-in-chief who first shoots before the thinks of consequences.
In due course of time Thomas L. Friedman ( with whose scribbling we are all so well acquainted), he or some other hack writer or loving sycophant will be saying the same about North Korea's Kim Jong-un , that Trump offered him all manner of sanctions relief and Christmas presents but dear Kim would not listen – when in fact what's happening and has been happening for some time now is that Kim is obviously a lot smarter than Trump and that's why Kim has been dribbling Trump and taking him for ride all this time and will finally bury him just a few weeks into Trump's final US presidential campaign desperate push for the White House.
Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, China, North Korea, many others, want regime change in the White House. I'm sure even our little Greta Thunberg who Trump has been mocking would like to see some regime change and away with trump who doesn't even acknowledge that there's anything like Climate Change worthy of his attention.
On Sunday, 5 January 2020 23:53:09 UTC+1, Toyin Falola wrote:TRUMP KILLS IRAN'S MOST OVERRATED WARRIOR
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Suleimani pushed his country to build an empire, but drove it into the ground instead.
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By Thomas L. Friedman, Columnist, New York Times (January 03, 2020)
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One day they may name a street after President Trump in Tehran. Why? Because Trump just ordered the assassination of possibly the dumbest man in Iran and the most overrated strategist in the Middle East: Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani.
Think of the miscalculations this guy made. In 2015, the United States and the major European powers agreed to lift virtually all their sanctions on Iran, many dating back to 1979, in return for Iran halting its nuclear weapons program for a mere 15 years, but still maintaining the right to have a peaceful nuclear program. It was a great deal for Iran. Its economy grew by over 12 percent the next year. And what did Suleimani do with that windfall?
He and Iran's supreme leader launched an aggressive regional imperial project that made Iran and its proxies the de facto controlling power in Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Sana. This freaked out U.S. allies in the Sunni Arab world and Israel — and they pressed the Trump administration to respond. Trump himself was eager to tear up any treaty forged by President Obama, so he exited the nuclear deal and imposed oil sanctions on Iran that have now shrunk the Iranian economy by almost 10 percent and sent unemployment over 16 percent.
All that for the pleasure of saying that Tehran can call the shots in Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Sana. What exactly was second prize?
With the Tehran regime severely deprived of funds, the ayatollahs had to raise gasoline prices at home, triggering massive domestic protests. That required a harsh crackdown by Iran's clerics against their own people that left thousands jailed and killed, further weakening the legitimacy of the regime.
Then Mr. "Military Genius" Suleimani decided that, having propped up the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and helping to kill 500,000 Syrians in the process, he would overreach again and try to put direct pressure on Israel. He would do this by trying to transfer precision-guided rockets from Iran to Iranian proxy forces in Lebanon and Syria.
Alas, Suleimani discovered that fighting Israel — specifically, its combined air force, special forces, intelligence and cyber — is not like fighting the Nusra front or the Islamic State. The Israelis hit back hard, sending a whole bunch of Iranians home from Syria in caskets and hammering their proxies as far away as Western Iraq.
Indeed, Israeli intelligence had so penetrated Suleimani's Quds Force and its proxies that Suleimani would land a plane with precision munitions in Syria at 5 p.m., and the Israeli air force would blow it up by 5:30 p.m. Suleimani's men were like fish in a barrel. If Iran had a free press and a real parliament, he would have been fired for colossal mismanagement.
But it gets better, or actually worse, for Suleimani. Many of his obituaries say that he led the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq, in tacit alliance with America. Well, that's true. But what they omit is that Suleimani's, and Iran's, overreaching in Iraq helped to produce the Islamic State in the first place.
It was Suleimani and his Quds Force pals who pushed Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to push Sunnis out of the Iraqi government and army, stop paying salaries to Sunni soldiers, kill and arrest large numbers of peaceful Sunni protesters and generally turn Iraq into a Shiite-dominated sectarian state. The Islamic State was the counterreaction.
Finally, it was Suleimani's project of making Iran the imperial power in the Middle East that turned Iran into the most hated power in the Middle East for many of the young, rising pro-democracy forces — both Sunnis and Shiites — in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.
As the Iranian-American scholar Ray Takeyh pointed out in a wise essay in Politico, in recent years "Soleimani began expanding Iran's imperial frontiers. For the first time in its history, Iran became a true regional power, stretching its influence from the banks of the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Soleimani understood that Persians would not be willing to die in distant battlefields for the sake of Arabs, so he focused on recruiting Arabs and Afghans as an auxiliary force. He often boasted that he could create a militia in little time and deploy it against Iran's various enemies."
It was precisely those Suleimani proxies — Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen — that created pro-Iranian Shiite states-within-states in all of these countries. And it was precisely these states-within-states that helped to prevent any of these countries from cohering, fostered massive corruption and kept these countries from developing infrastructure — schools, roads, electricity.
And therefore it was Suleimani and his proxies — his "kingmakers" in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq — who increasingly came to be seen, and hated, as imperial powers in the region, even more so than Trump's America. This triggered popular, authentic, bottom-up democracy movements in Lebanon and Iraq that involved Sunnis and Shiites locking arms together to demand noncorrupt, nonsectarian democratic governance.
On Nov. 27, Iraqi Shiites — yes, Iraqi Shiites — burned down the Iranian consulate in Najaf, Iraq, removing the Iranian flag from the building and putting an Iraqi flag in its place. That was after Iraqi Shiites, in September 2018, set the Iranian consulate in Basra ablaze, shouting condemnations of Iran's interference in Iraqi politics.
The whole "protest" against the United States Embassy compound in Baghdad last week was almost certainly a Suleimani-staged operation to make it look as if Iraqis wanted America out when in fact it was the other way around. The protesters were paid pro-Iranian militiamen. No one in Baghdad was fooled by this.
In a way, it's what got Suleimani killed. He so wanted to cover his failures in Iraq he decided to start provoking the Americans there by shelling their forces, hoping they would overreact, kill Iraqis and turn them against the United States. Trump, rather than taking the bait, killed Suleimani instead.
I have no idea whether this was wise or what will be the long-term implications. But here are two things I do know about the Middle East.
First, often in the Middle East the opposite of "bad" is not "good." The opposite of bad often turns out to be "disorder." Just because you take out a really bad actor like Suleimani doesn't mean a good actor, or a good change in policy, comes in his wake. Suleimani is part of a system called the Islamic Revolution in Iran. That revolution has managed to use oil money and violence to stay in power since 1979 — and that is Iran's tragedy, a tragedy that the death of one Iranian general will not change.
Today's Iran is the heir to a great civilization and the home of an enormously talented people and significant culture. Wherever Iranians go in the world today, they thrive as scientists, doctors, artists, writers and filmmakers — except in the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose most famous exports are suicide bombing, cyberterrorism and proxy militia leaders. The very fact that Suleimani was probably the most famous Iranian in the region speaks to the utter emptiness of this regime, and how it has wasted the lives of two generations of Iranians by looking for dignity in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways.
The other thing I know is that in the Middle East all important politics happens the morning after the morning after.
Yes, in the coming days there will be noisy protests in Iran, the burning of American flags and much crying for the "martyr." The morning after the morning after? There will be a thousand quiet conversations inside Iran that won't get reported. They will be about the travesty that is their own government and how it has squandered so much of Iran's wealth and talent on an imperial project that has made Iran hated in the Middle East.
And yes, the morning after, America's Sunni Arab allies will quietly celebrate Suleimani's death, but we must never forget that it is the dysfunction of many of the Sunni Arab regimes — their lack of freedom, modern education and women's empowerment — that made them so weak that Iran was able to take them over from the inside with its proxies.
I write these lines while flying over New Zealand, where the smoke from forest fires 2,500 miles away over eastern Australia can be seen and felt. Mother Nature doesn't know Suleimani's name, but everyone in the Arab world is going to know her name. Because the Middle East, particularly Iran, is becoming an environmental disaster area — running out of water, with rising desertification and overpopulation. If governments there don't stop fighting and come together to build resilience against climate change — rather than celebrating self-promoting military frauds who conquer failed states and make them fail even more — they're all doomed.
Sent from my iPhone
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