"I have no idea whether this was wise or what will be the long-term implications", opines Thomas L. Friedman, Columnist, New York Times. I could also ask him, is Israel now a much safer place and if so, why is the IDF on 24 hours high alert?
The situation is frightening. Thank God, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives is making a timely intervention to limit the War powers of Donald J Trump who just now is acting like a mad elephant in a China shop, reckless beyond belief and absolutely delighted with all the military hardware that he could possibly dream of and the nuclear codes right there in his little hands. Hadn't he taken the podium at the General Assembly of United Nations two years ago to insult and threaten "little rocket man" that he would "totally destroy" his country ( nuclear annihilation) if North Korea stepped out of line or didn't comply with his demands? It's a surprise that he hasn't yet threatened to reduce Iran to nuclear rubble if they hurt a single hair of any of his troops stationed in the region – or elsewhere or if he himself is assassinated. The latter threat would suggest that the most boastful Trump - America's greatest president ever is a good living example of the Dunning–Kruger effect believing that he can act courageously, even posthumously…
"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." (Thomas L. Friedman). Gives the impression that the Quds forces in Syria are infiltrated through and through with many an Eli Cohen and Iranian, Syrian and Lebanese double agents. Israeli intelligence, yes, also aided by satellites and US intelligence too…
Apparently Israeli intelligence has not been able to prevent Hezbollah's accumulated stockpiles of lethal rockets in Lebanon which were either manufactured there or got there one way or the other causing Sheikh Nasrallah who occasionally comes out of hiding ( because with Trump in the chair, he fears that his days could be numbered) - therefore make hap while the sun shines he says that Israel is weaker than a spider and is threatening to dump all that he's got -- if he can, on the Dimona nuclear facility… pretty scary ….
Thomas L. Friedman paragraph 3 o is such a whopping distortion of the landscape – as if all was peace and quiet in 2015….
(To be continued
On Monday, 6 January 2020 02:56:52 UTC+1, Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:
To date, the Arab nation Syria is the most faithful Soviet/ Russian ally, something that the US still cannot countenance, and now the Russians are back in town and are as Freidman doesn't say, "propping up "Assad.
It has always been the United States ambition to project US influence and power across the oil rich Middle East - from the CIA operation against iran's Mossadegh in 1953, the strengthening of The Pahlavi dynasty which was eventually ended by the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 – simultaneous with the Radical Islamic students detaining the embassy staff in Iran for a good 444 days - something that American presidents are unwilling to forgive or forget, the Iraq – Iran war started by Saddam Hussein invading Iran and destroying Iran's oil facilities at Abadan, baby Bush's eventual illegal invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam and minority Sunni dominance, good Shia neighbour Iran marching in once Saddam was gone, after which Fallujah attracted certain al Qaeda elements, other disparate Sunni terrorist groups at Fallujah the headquarters of the Sunni insurgency against majority Shia rule, eventually regrouping to give birth to al-Baghdadi's Islamic State, with a little help from Soleimani & Co the defeat of the Islamic State and as background to all this, the past ten years, the ups and downs about Iran going nuclear. Isn't that a rough resume?
All would be fine if only Trump would present the document to all the players in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Libya and kindly asked them all to lay down their weapöns and please sign where it says "Sign here!"
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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