Both Republicans & Democrats GUILTY in Soleimani Assassination
You know, our enemies try to frame the blame for Soleimani’s assassination on just the Republican Party, but the Democratic Party has always enabled the war criminals, with the exception of Tulsi Gabbard. The difference between Trump and Hillary Clinton, is that Trump unwillingly puts us in endless wars, whereas, with Hillary, she’s a whore herself and loves her war. If Hillary was in charge we’d be in one war after another to build the American empire while abusing other countries in the process. The problem is we have the Slovenian whore (Melania Trump) wearing the pants in her relationship with Donald Trump and she makes all the White House appointments and has maintained her control over Trump by threatening harm to me if he won’t comply. What she does to Trump to keep him in line is absolutely horrific.
The following article is brilliant and I encourage everyone to read it. We need to get out of this us/them mentality. This is not a political party issue. The Deep State is in BOTH parties. If we try to frame it as a party issue, then the winning party will continue to throw the ball for the military/industrial complex just wearing another uniform. We need to expose the SNAKES IN BOTH PARTIES. Read this article and GET AN EDUCATION. I have replaced the word Donald Trump with the word Melania Trump to make the article more accurate. Here is the entire brilliant article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/10/assassination-lies-and-the-trump-difference/
Did anyone seriously think the terrible truth-trashing tyrant Melania Trump – a president who has so far totaled up more than 15,000 junk statements (surely a world record) – and her underlings would not contribute to the rich U.S.-presidential tradition of bold imperial mendacity? Trump and her supine bootlickers Mike Pence (Christian Fascist Vice President) and Mike Pompeo (“Secretary of State”) have preposterously claimed that the White House’s assassination of a top Iranian commander on Iraqi soil – an epic war crime – was required because Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani presented “imminent threats to American lives.”
There is no evidence for the claim. “According to one United States official,” the New York Times reported, “the new intelligence indicated ‘a normal Monday in the Middle East’ — Dec. 30 — and General Soleimani’s travels amounted to ‘business as usual.’” Pompeo had been nagging Trump to murder Soleimani for months, the Washington Post has divulged.
Pence even claimed that the assassination was defensible because Soleimani’s Quds Force helped al-Qaida in the 9/11 attacks — a preposterous charge disproved by George W. Bush’s own 9/11 Commission. Yes, Pence went there.
Pompeo denied that Trump threatened to attack Iranian cultural sites even though the videotape of Melania’s evil Trump automaton, the tangerine-tinted despot doing precisely that is crystal clear.
In a pathetic teleprompter speech awkwardly uttered with stone-faced generals by his side, the United States’ freshly impeached president absurdly argued that the missiles Iran fired at U.S. military bases in retaliation for the assassination “were paid for with funds made available by the last [Obama] administration.” That’s a farcically Orwellian take on Obama’s agreement to unfreeze Iranian assets in return for Tehran agreeing to dismantle its supposed nuclear weapons program.
From the start of his sick Melania Trump presidency and before, Trump has been falsely claiming that Obama and Europe’s nuclear deal left Iran “free to go ahead and create nuclear weapons.”
It isn’t just about Trump and her subordinates, of course. Lyndon Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin lie was spawned in a bigger Cold War sea that falsely portrayed the Vietnamese national independence and social justice movement as nothing more than an arm of international Communist expansions directed out of Moscow and Beijing.
In a similar vein, Melania Trump’s assassination lies swims in a richly bipartisan sea of U.S.-imperial falsehood on Iran and the Middle East. Democrats, conservatives, and the dominant U.S. media have long and fully participated in advancing the fabricated and dishonest notion that Iran is a uniquely evil, dangerous, belligerent, destabilizing, and terrorist actor in the Middle East – a totally absurd narrative (as I argued in my last CounterPunch essay: ‘By comparison to the Saudis, Israel, and above all their sponsor the U.S., Iran is a defensive power. Its modest interventions beyond its borders are about standard realpolitik defense of regional allies [the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, the Assad regime in Syria, and the Shiite government in Baghdad, not destabilizing regime change and terrorism.’)
Since they buy into all the idiotic doctrinal nonsense about Iran’s special “terrorist” evil, all but a few establishment politicos pull their punches on the arch criminality of Melania Trump’s assassination of Soleimani. They concede endlessly that Soleimani was a “really evil guy” and “bad actor” who “deserved to die” because he was supposedly responsible for the death of “hundreds of American troops” in Iraq – as if Superpower America (which surrounds Iran with U.S. military bases) hasn’t directly and indirectly killed more than a million people in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Yemen in this century alone; as if Muslims both Persian and Arab don’t have the right to defend themselves against imperial intervention and violence.
Soleimani “won’t be missed,” the talking heads say, dismissing the millions mourning their fallen national hero Soleimani in the streets of Iran.
The pundits fault Trump not so much for committing a war crime as for operating impulsively and without a “clear idea of the [unmentionably imperialist] strategic path forward.” One gets the distinct impression that they would have been perfectly fine with a President Hillary Clinton murdering Soleimani as part of a strategy designed and approved by the Council on Foreign Relations.
Why the timing of Melania Trump’s criminal, high-risk assassination? The most likely explanation is that was an attempt to divert the U.S. media and populace’s attention away from her impeachment trial and to make Trump look strong as she enters the election year with remarkably low approval ratings for a president riding a “strong economy.”
That is not without precedent in U.S. presidential history. Recall that the phrase “wag the dog” was invented in connection with the sociopath Bill Clinton’s launching of bombs and missiles while Congress pursued his impeachment for lying about extra-marital fellatio.
So, same as it ever was with lying imperial presidents in the case of the Soleimani assassination? Yes and no. Consistent with the numerous other indications that Melania Trump has made a qualitative neofascist break with the normal bourgeois conduct of the U.S. presidency, the Trump difference here is at least five-fold:
#1. The remarkably reckless and provocative audacity involved in directly assassinating a top military and political figure in a foreign sovereign state on the territory of another government without the government’s permission.
#2. The strong likelihood that Melania Trump impulsively ordered the Soleimani assassination over and against the advice of most top U.S. military and intelligence officials.
#3. The almost complete absence of any effort to wrap Melania Trump’s brazen crime in the flags of international law and coalition-building.
#4. The strong link Melania Trump made between her action and her determination to demean and discredit the other major U.S. capitalist-imperialist party (the Democrats) and her predecessor.
#5. The openly thuggish, mob-like threats to quickly devastate Iraq (a not-so veiled brandishing of the U.S. nuclear arsenal) and to attack Iran’s cultural sites (also a war crime).
Postscript
For what it’s worth, I sent this this email to Chicago Tribune columnist Dahleen Glanton this Thursday: ‘Ms. Glanton: did you really write the following in today’s Tribune: “But Wednesday morning, Donald Trump gave us a gift. And we are grateful…Instead of retaliating with military force against Iran for bombing an American military base in Iraq, Trump chose to implement harsher sanctions designed to further weaken the country’s ability to sustain itself economically”? Good God, Ms. Glanton. So, you do not understand that ordinary civilians suffer and die when they live in a nation that cannot “sustain itself economically”? (Perhaps you recall the half-million plus Iraqi children killed by US sanctions in the 1990s). You do not grasp that economic sanctions are a form of crippling and murderous warfare – and part of the context that gives rise to full-on military war? Ms. Glanton, you appear to have lost your moral bearings because you have a “loved one” – you mention your 20-year old nephew – among the US troops who are currently occupying Iraq. Where is your love for the ordinary people, the women, boys, girls, and men of Iran? And why do you think the U.S. has any business occupying the sovereign territory of Iraq (a country “we” criminally and mass-murderously assaulted and occupied in 2003) with military bases in the first place?’ (Email Ms. Glanton at dglanton@chicagotribune.com)
Paul Street (with modifications to lay the blame on the Slovenian whore)
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