He Finally Did It Friday Reads

Posted: January 3, 2020 | Author: | Filed under: Middle East, morning reads | Tags: , | 22 Comments
The interior view of a munitions factory showing the production of 15 inch shells by women factory workers. There are winches hanging from the ceiling and large steel shell cases sitting on wooden trolleys in the centre of the image.

Shop for Machining 15-inch Shells by Anna Airy. © IWM (Art.IWM ART 2271)

Happy New Year!

I wish I could say this with a lot of hope in my heart but after last night’s late news we’ll be lucky at this point if we avoid World War III.  Also, this time there will be no allies because Cadet Bone Spurs thinks we can just go it alone and has managed to offend every friendly country in the world.  His Maximum Pressure approach to the world has not only left us friendless but more likely facing increased violence around the world.

Trump’s freaky christofascists have been frothing at the mouth for their mythical end times.  I suggest they grab a bucket and go help Australia if they’re really all concerned about the earth ending in fire.  Problem is my freakish friends, according to your specific mythology, a Temple has to exist that no one’s built yet so I’d think twice about travelling any where around the world or signing up for the diplomatic corps or the marine corps for that matter.  We are just one target rich environment now.

Since this assassination reminds me a bit of the Arch Duke Ferdinand one that kicked off World War I I decided to give you some paintings from the period.  This collection comes  from the UK’s Imperial War Museum: “6 STUNNING FIRST WORLD WAR ARTWORKS BY WOMEN WAR ARTISTS.”  You can read the backstories on the painters and their work at the site.   Basically, the IWM commissioned the women to capture the women’s effort in the so-called War to End all Wars.

So, here’s what’s gone down so far.  The U.S. directly targeted and killed an Iranian general that was, in fact a very bad man.  However, there are a lot of very bad men in the world that need to disappear and if they did, no one would care.  This one has quite a few people that care about him and they all have no problem with dying for a cause as they’ve proven over the last 40 years.   This is from the NYT: “U.S. Strike in Iraq Kills Qassim Suleimani, Commander of Iranian Forces”.

Iran’s top security and intelligence commander was killed early Friday in a drone strike at Baghdad International Airport that was authorized by President Trump, American officials said.

The commander, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, who led the powerful Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, was killed along with several officials from Iraqi militias backed by Tehran when an American MQ-9 Reaper drone fired missiles into a convoy that was leaving the airport.

General Suleimani was the architect of nearly every significant operation by Iranian intelligence and military forces over the past two decades, and his death was a staggering blow for Iran at a time of sweeping geopolitical conflict.

The strike was also a serious escalation of Mr. Trump’s growing confrontation with Tehran, one that began with the death of an American contractor in Iraq in late December.

The interior view of a canteen with flags of the allied countries hanging like bunting along the top of the room. On the right the room is crowded with soldiers awaiting their meal. In the foreground and left are women preparing to serve them.

Christmas Day in the London Bridge YMCA Canteen, 1920, by Clare Atwood. © IWM (Art.IWM ART 3062)

Please tell me we didn’t do all this for a Defense Department Mercenary Contractor.  I have yet to hear who this person actually was but if it’s the result of Rumsfeld’s war privatization efforts I’d totally believe it.

It took awhile for the Defense Department to take credit for the assassination of Suleimani and others so we all got our news from Iraqi and then Irani state TV.  Sort’ve like we always hear about news about Russia from Russian State TV first.  The Spawn of the Orange Swamp Thing seemed to  know more about the attack than just about any one but definitely more than Congress and the all important Gang of 8 who handle that sort’ve thing for the country.  Here’s a bit from Hill Reporter: “Deleted Tweet From Eric Trump Hints He May Have Known About Strike Against Iranian Military Leader Days Ahead Of Time’. Doesn’t that bring you comfort and joy or the season?  You know, Peace on Earth, Good Will to Man and all that jazz?

The protests that broke out around the embassy got an off the cuff tweet from Eric the Dim.

Those protests broke out on December 31 of last year, according to the New York Times. On that same date, Eric Trump sent out a tweet, which has since been deleted. Twitter user @realTuckFrumper had a screengrab of the tweet, which suggested military action was coming forth.

“Bout to open up a big ol’ can of whoop ass,” Eric Trump’s tweet read. It was followed with a flag emoji.

Other users on social media also verified the tweet as being legitimately posted by Eric Trump on that date. There’s no indication or confirmation that he was indeed aware of military action occurring later on in the week, but the words from Eric Trump caught many people’s attention after the airstrikes were announced.

A view along the cloister of an abbey, in which there is a row of beds filled with patients on the left. In the left foreground three nurses tend to a male patient, who sits up in bed.

The Scottish Women’s Hospital: In The Cloister of the Abbaye at Royaumont, 1920, by Norah Neilson-Gray. © IWM (Art.IWM ART 3090)

The UK Guardian has a subtle lede this morning over an Op Ed penned by Mohammad Ali Shabani.  “Donald Trump’s assassination of Qassem Suleimani will come back to haunt him. The Quds force leader had the status of national hero even among secular Iranians. His death could act as a rallying cry”

The US has assassinated Qassem Suleimani, the famed leader of Iran’s Quds force, alongside a senior commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Units, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. To grasp what may come next, it is vital to understand not only who these men were but also the system that produced them.

Nicknamed the “Shadow Commander” in the popular press, Suleimani spent his formative years on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war during the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein – who at the time enjoyed the support of western and Arab powers – was attempting to destroy the emerging Islamic Republic. But few remember that his first major mission as commander of the Quds force – the extraterritorial branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards – was involved in implicit coordination with the United States as it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. The Taliban were, and to some extent remain, a mutual enemy. That alliance of convenience ended in 2002 when US president George W Bush notoriously branded Iran a member of the “Axis of Evil”.

In the years after, Suleimani laboured to bleed the US military in places like Iraq. He succeeded. After having spent trillions of dollars and lost thousands of troops, Washington withdrew from Iraq – partly as a result of Iranian pressure on the Iraqi government – in 2011.

But Suleimani had little time to celebrate. His attention was turned to containing fallout from the Arab spring, focusing his energy on propping up the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. That development saw the creation of a region-wide network of Iran-backed militias numbering more than 100,000 men, unprecedented Iranian military collaboration with Russia and the transformation of Hezbollah into a force capable of operating on significant scale outside Lebanon’s borders.

By 2014, when he successfully halted Islamic State’s attempt to overrun Iraq, Suleimani was feted as a hero among Iraqis, alongside the local commanders including al-Muhandis. The same response was evident in Iran, where he quickly became a household name and was rumoured as a potential future president – a trend that was strengthened by the Trump administration’s unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018.

So the US has not merely killed an Iranian military commander but also a highly popular figure, viewed as a guardian of Iran even among secular-minded Iranians. And with the assassination of al-Muhandis, the Trump administration has put itself in the position of having killed the operational commander of a large branch of the Iraqi armed forces.

Some will characterise the killings as a huge blow to Iran’s proxy capabilities and wider policy in the region. But such an approach ignores how the Iranian system is structured.

a soldier is lying propped on his elbow in an enclosed space, while a female figure in uniform lights his cigarette.

In an Ambulance: a VAD lighting a cigarette for a patient, by Olive Mudie-Cooke. © IWM (Art.IWM ART 3051)

As reported last night on MSNBC by a very shaken Andrea Mitchell on The Last Word,  this is exactly why Israel–who could’ve taken him out at a moment’s notice–never gave it a second thought.  The second and third order conditions were considered to be worse than any benefit from the assassination.  Mitchell actually interviewed SOD Mike Esper in what turned out to be an interview worth dissecting. 

Even more disturbing was an interview later on a special Rachel Maddow with “Brett McGurk, who served as special envoy on the global coalition to defeat ISIS under Pres. Obama and Pres. Trump, talks to Rachel Maddow about the serious implications of the strike on Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force.”  You may watch the video but here’s the bottom line: ” McGurk on US strike on Soleimani: ‘We need to presume that we are now in a state of war with Iran’.”

Iraq is truly in a bad place now.  And, I know, it’s not like we haven’t put them in a bad place since Dubya’s adventures there at the behest of all those Chicken Hawk Cabinet members of his.  But, this Op Ed from the UK Independent describes the situation in more detail “Iraq’s worst fears have come true – they are now at the centre of a proxy war between the US and Iran. General Qassem Soleimani made a terrible mistake in the final weeks of his life by underestimating the popular protests across Iraq. Donald Trump has made a bigger one in killing the influential commander.”  This is written by Patrick Cockburn.

I spoke to Abu Alaa al-Walai, the leader of Kata’ib Sayyid al Shuhada, a splinter group of Kata’ib Hezbollah, one of whose camps had been destroyed by a drone attack in August. He said that 50 tonnes of weapons and ammunition had been blown up, blaming the Israelis and the Americans acting in concert. Asked if his men would attack US forces in Iraq in the event of a US-Iran war, he said: “Absolutely yes.” Later I visited the camp, called al-Saqr, on the outskirts of Baghdad where a massive explosion had gutted sheds and littered the burned-out compound with shattered pieces of equipment.

I saw other pro-Iranian paramilitary leaders at this time. The drone attacks had made them edgy, but I got the impression that they did not really expect a US-Iran war. Qais al-Khazali, the head of Asaib Ahl al-Haq, told me that he did not think there would be a war “because Trump does not want one.” As evidence of this, he pointed to the failure of Trump to retaliate after the drone attack on Saudi oil facilities earlier in September that Washington had been blamed on Iran.

In fact, events developed very differently from what both I and the paramilitary commanders expected. A few days after I had spoken to them, there was a small demonstration in central Baghdad demanding jobs, public services and an end to corruption. The security forces and the pro-Iranian paramilitaries opened fire, killing and wounding many peaceful demonstrators. Though Qais al-Khazali later claimed that he and other Hashd leaders were trying to thwart a US-Israeli conspiracy, he had said nothing to me about it. It seemed likely that General Soleimani, wrongly suspected that the paltry demonstrations were a real threat and had ordered the pro-Iranian paramilitaries to open fire and put a plan for suppressing the demonstrations into operation.

All this could have been disastrous for Iranian influence in Iraq. Soleimani had made the classic mistake of a successful general in imaging that “a whiff of grapeshot” will swiftly repress any signs of popular discontent. Sometimes this works, often it does not – and Iraq turned out to belong to the second category.

General Soleimani died in the wake of his greatest failure and misjudgement. But the manner of his killing may convince many Shia Iraqis that the threat to Iraqi independence from the US is greater than that from Iran. The next few days will tell if the protest movement, that has endured the violence used against it with much bravery, will be deflated by the killings at Baghdad airport.

 

The interior of a canteen filled with female workers. There is a counter to the right of the composition, and tables occupied with women in overalls and cloth caps to the left. There is a queue at the counter, with several women holding large white cups.

Women’s Canteen at Phoenix Works, Bradford, 1918, by Flora Lion. © The rights holder (Art.IWM ART 4434)

This Dexter Filkins piece in The New Yorker from September 2013 is a good place to read a profile on Soleimani.   The NYT also has a profile “Qassim Suleimani, Master of Iran’s Intrigue, Built a Shiite Axis of Power in Mideast. The commander helped direct wars in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, and he became the face of Iran’s efforts to build a regional bloc of Shiite power.”  This link is for that article  which was published today.

General Suleimani was at the vanguard of Iran’s revolutionary generation, joining the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in his early 20s after the 1979 uprising that enshrined the country’s Shiite theocracy.

He rose quickly during the brutal Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. And since 1998, he was the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ influential Quds Force, the foreign-facing arm of Iran’s security apparatus, melding intelligence work with a military strategy of nurturing proxy forces across the world.

In the West, he was seen as a clandestine force behind an Iranian campaign of international terrorism. He and other Iranian officials were designated as terrorists by the United States and Israel in 2011, accused of a plot to kill the ambassador of Saudi Arabia, one of Iran’s chief enemies in the region, in Washington. Last year, in April, the entire Quds Force was listed as a foreign terrorism group by the Trump administration.

But in Iran, many saw him as a larger-than-life hero, particularly within security circles. Anecdotes about his asceticism and quiet charisma joined to create an image of a warrior-philosopher who became the backbone of a nation’s defense against a host of enemies.

He was close to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who on Friday issued a statement calling for three days of public mourning and “forceful revenge,” in a declaration that amounted to a threat of retaliation against the United States.

“His departure to God does not end his path or his mission,” he said.

All this means is that many Shia Islam followers in quite a few countries are not going to let him go quietly into the great night.  It also means that Congress will have another likely investigation on its hands which means a lot more on Nancy Peolosi’s To Do LIst.

So, this is a long post and it has taken me a good deal of time to compile but I hope it will give us a basis for conversation today.  I hope that your New Year will be wonderful and that you will be surrounded by all the family, love, and happiness you deserve!!!  May all Goodness in the Universe protect us on this where yet another war seems inevitable!

What’s on you reading and blogging list today?

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.

John Lennon

 

Thursday Reads: The Political Press Slowly Comes Back to Life

Posted: January 2, 2020 | Author: | Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Foreign Affairs, U.S. Politics | 39 Comments

Good Afternoon!!

The long holiday news blackout is finally drawing to a close. A big story just broke at Just Security: Exclusive: Unredacted Ukraine Documents Reveal Extent of Pentagon’s Legal Concerns.

“Clear direction from POTUS to continue to hold.”

This is what Michael Duffey, associate director of national security programs at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), told Elaine McCusker, the acting Pentagon comptroller, in an Aug. 30 email, which has only been made available in redacted form until now. It is one of many documents the Trump administration is trying to keep from the public, despite congressional oversight efforts and court orders in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation.

Earlier in the day on Aug. 30, President Donald Trump met with Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to discuss the president’s hold on $391 million in military assistance for Ukraine. Inside the Trump administration, panic was reaching fever pitch about the president’s funding hold, which had stretched on for two months. Days earlier, POLITICO had broken the story and questions were starting to pile up. U.S. defense contractors were worried about delayed contracts and officials in Kyiv and lawmakers on Capitol Hill wanted to know what on earth was going on. While Trump’s national security team thought withholding the money went against U.S. national security interests, Trump still wouldn’t budge.

Thanks to the testimony of several Trump administration officials, we now know what Trump was waiting on: a commitment from Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden.

But getting at that truth hasn’t been easy and the Trump administration continues to try to obscure it. It is blocking key officials from testifying and is keeping documentary evidence from lawmakers investigating the Ukraine story. For example, this note from Duffey to McCusker was never turned over to House investigators and the Trump administration is continuing to try to keep it secret.

Just Security has been reviewing the unredacted documents.

The documents reveal growing concern from Pentagon officials that the hold would violate the Impoundment Control Act, which requires the executive branch to spend money as appropriated by Congress, and that the necessary steps to avoid this result weren’t being taken. Those steps would include notifying Congress that the funding was being held or shifted elsewhere, a step that was never taken. The emails also show that no rationale was ever given for why the hold was put in place or why it was eventually lifted.

What is clear is that it all came down to the president and what he wanted; no one else appears to have supported his position. Although the pretext for the hold was that some sort of policy review was taking place, the emails make no mention of that actually happening. Instead, officials were anxiously waiting for the president to be convinced that the hold was a bad idea. And while the situation continued throughout the summer, senior defense officials were searching for legal guidance, worried they would be blamed should the hold be lifted too late to actually spend all of the money, which would violate the law.

The emails also reveal key decision points, moments when senior officials hoped the hold might be lifted. This includes Vice President Mike Pence’s September meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which a senior defense official expected would resolve the funding issue, raising the question: Why? What was supposed to come out of that meeting that would pave the way for Trump to lift the hold? What was Pence expected to communicate?

But, the hold wasn’t immediately lifted after Pence’s meeting with Zelenskyy. Instead, the president finally released the money on Sept. 11, just as the whistleblower complaint was about to break into the open.

Read much more at the link and or check out these Twitter threads:

https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1212764116647120896

This is all more fuel for the impeachment fire and more justification for Nancy Pelosi’s decision to hang on to the already passed impeachment articles for awhile.

Eleanor Clift at The Daily Beast: How Long Can Nancy Pelosi Hold Back These Articles of Impeachment? Longer Than You Think.

“This is working beautifully for her, and for the country,” says Norm Ornstein, a political scientist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “In the weeks since the House voted for Impeachment, there have been more damning emails, and there’s no reason to believe we have seen the end of it.”

Delaying the trial allows more evidence of wrongdoing by the president and his allies to surface and potentially sway public opinion and perhaps even some Senate Republicans.

After the House voted the articles, the conventional wisdom was that Democrats needed the Senate to act quickly so a trial would conclude before the 2020 primaries got underway. That thinking has now shifted. “A trial at some point is almost inevitable,” says Ornstein. “But I don’t see any reason to push it forward as long as Democrats have the upper hand.”

Pushed for a time limit, Ornstein told The Daily Beast that he thinks Pelosi can extend through February, “keeping all options open,” he said. “In moments of this kind, my lodestar is whatever Pelosi does is best.”

Tom Mann with the Brookings Institution and co-author with Ornstein of the 2012 book about Congress, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, said in an email that he’s “sure Pelosi is adjusting her cost/benefit analysis and consulting widely every day. McConnell’s outrageous behavior gives her cover to stretch this out to force genuine consultations on rules and witnesses for the trial. If and when she finds the political costs are likely to outweigh the benefits, she will refer the articles to the Senate. But not until then.”

Anyone who bets against Nancy is a damn fool.

The Washington Post Editorial Board: The Senate and the public need to hear from Mulvaney and Bolton.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is withholding two articles of impeachment from the Senate, pending assurance that the Republican leader of that body, Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), will agree to a full and fair trial of the House’s charges against President Trump. Whatever else may be said about the speaker’s move, and however long her holdout lasts, it has certainly taken advantage of some inevitable holiday-season downtime to focus attention on the Senate’s role in the process. So far, that has meant much-needed discussion of Mr. McConnell’s obvious — and obviously political — intention to go through the motions of a trial on the way to an acquittal.

Now fresh reporting from the New York Times has emerged to strengthen the Democrats’ minimum condition of a real trial: The Senate must seek witness testimony from key players in Mr. Trump’s attempt to strong-arm Ukraine into announcing an investigation of his political rival, former vice president Joe Biden, using congressionally appropriated military aid and promises of a White House visit as leverage. The Times reports, based in part on previously undisclosed emails, that acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney tried to freeze the military aid on Mr. Trump’s behalf as early as June, prompting puzzlement and backlash within the administration — to the extent that Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and then-national security adviser John Bolton convened a White House meeting with Mr. Trump to urge release of the aid. Mr. Trump, apparently fixated on the idea that Ukraine had tried to defeat him in 2016, balked, asserting, contrary to Defense Department certifications, that Ukraine was hopelessly corrupt.

Trump’s foreign policy is a raging dumpster fire:

David Sanger at The New York Times: Trump Bet He Could Isolate Iran and Charm North Korea. It’s Not That Easy.

While the Iranian-backed attack on the United States Embassy in Baghdad seemed to be under control, it played to Mr. Trump’s longtime worry that American diplomats and troops in the Middle East are easy targets and his longtime position that the United States must pull back from the region.

In North Korea, Kim Jong-un’s declaration on Wednesday that the world would “witness a new strategic weapon” seemed to be the end of an 18-month experiment in which Mr. Trump believed his force of personality — and vague promises of economic development — would wipe away a problem that plagued the last 12 of his predecessors.

The timing of these new challenges is critical: Both the Iranians and the North Koreans seem to sense the vulnerability of a president under impeachment and facing re-election, even if they are often clumsy as they try to play those events to their advantage….

The protests in Iraq calmed on Wednesday, and Mr. Kim has not yet unveiled his latest “strategic weapon.” But the events of recent days have underscored how much bluster was behind Mr. Trump’s boast a year ago that Iran was “a very different nation” since he had broken its economy by choking off its oil revenues. They also belied his famous tweet: “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.”

Today the most generous thing one could say about those statements is that they were wildly premature. Many foreign policy experts say he fundamentally misjudged the reactions of two major American adversaries. Neither seems to fear him, precisely the critique he leveled at Barack Obama back in the days when Mr. Trump declared America’s toughest national security challenges would be solved as soon as a president the world respected was in office.

The core problem may have been Mr. Trump’s conviction that economic incentives alone — oil profits in Tehran and the prospect of investment and glorious beach-front hotels in North Korea — would overcome all other national interests.

Trump only cares about money and his own selfish needs; he doesn’t understand that other may be driven by ideology or moral values.

More stories to check out:

The New York Times Editorial Board: Shock Waves From American Airstrikes in Iraq May Have Just Begun.

The New York Times: ‘It’s Creepy’: Unexplained Drones Are Swarming by Night Over Colorado.

Greg Sargent at The Washington Post: A dishonestly edited video of Joe Biden signals what’s coming.https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/02/dishonestly-edited-video-joe-biden-signals-whats-coming/

Farhad Manjoo at The New York Times: Only You Can Prevent Dystopia. How to survive the internet in 2020. (It’s not going to be easy.)

 

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