The Empire is Finished–It’s Just a Matter of Time by Bruce Gagnon + Postmortem Assassination of Iran’s General Soleimani by Finian Cunningham

Image by Stephen Melkisethian via Flickr

by Bruce Gagnon
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Organizing Notes, Jan. 6, 2020
January 7, 2020

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said yesterday, after the Iraqi government had asked the US to leave their country, pack up and close the US bases, “the United States is prepared to help the Iraqi people get what they deserve and continue our mission.” He went on to say that the Iraqi people want the US to keep their bases in Iraq.

This is of course nonsense. [See video clip below] The US uses the bases in Iraq to steal Iraqi oil just as it is doing in northern Syria with it troops guarding and stealing Syrian oil. America has become a pirate, a bandit and a terrorist.

“Iran must respect the sovereignty of its neighbors and immediately cease its provision of lethal aid and support to third parties in Iraq and throughout the region,” Pompeo said.

The entire US Middle East policy is now crashing and burning. Washington has ignited a fuse that it will not be able to extinguish any time soon. No one trusts Washington anymore to seriously negotiate anything.

US arrogance has finally reached the point where no one can hide the truth anymore. The US is playing an evil game. It’s lost all moral and legal authority. The only thing Washington can do is threaten, bludgeon and kill those who get in the way.

The empire is finished. It’s just a matter of time. If the ‘allies’ were smart they would jump ship now while they still can. This American ‘ship of state’ is sinking fast. Those hanging onto to America will drown as well.

If smart, the American people will demand that the corporate oligarchies that run the government be overturned immediately. We need non-violent revolution in this country. Neither of the two corporate owned political parties can get us out of this mess. They are far too deeply embedded and implicated in America’s crimes against humanity.

Pompeo: ‘I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole’

RT on Apr 22, 2019

‘I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.’ – Pompeo

Secretary Pompeo participates in a Q&A discussion at Texas A&M University as part of the Wiley Lecture Series, in College Station, Texas on April 15, 2019.

A transcript is available at https://www.state.gov/remarks-at-texas-am-wiley-lecture-series/

Postmortem Assassination of Iran’s General Soleimani

by Finian Cunningham
Writer, Dandelion Salad
East Africa
Crossposted from Strategic Culture Foundation, Jan. 5, 2020
January 7, 2020

Even before he was buried, Iranian General Qasem Soleimani had to endure a second assassination at the hands of the Americans; besmirching his character and military history.

U.S. President Trump declared the “world’s number-one terrorist” had been “caught” and “terminated” by American forces when they launched an airstrike on Soleimani’s motorcade at Baghdad airport on Friday, January 3. The leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force was blown to pieces, his body later identified only from a distinctive red-stone ring he wore on his left hand.

At least six other members of the convoy were also killed including Abud Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). The PMF are an officially recognized component of the Iraq national defense forces, which the U.S. is supposedly allied with.

Soleimani and Al-Muhandis were revered in Iran and Iraq, and across the Middle East, for their masterful defeat of the Islamic State terror group and its multiple al Qaeda offshoots. Iran and Iranian-backed militia were crucial in the routing of the al Qaeda-linked terror network in Iraq and Syria.

Soleimani was also feted as a national hero in Iran for his courageous leadership during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88).

Now, according to the Trump administration, the Iranian general was no different from the dead leaders of Al Qaeda and Islamic State, Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Trump boasted that the world was safer (again) because he had ordered the killing of Soleimani.

“Let this be a warning to terrorists: if you value your own life, you will not threaten the lives of our citizens,” Trump declared hours after the assassination. He bracketed Soleimani’s death with “these monsters”, saying the Iranian commander had “a sick passion for killing innocent people”.

Heaping insult upon insult, Trump told evangelical Christian supporters in Florida that the U.S. “did not seek war” but rather was seeking “a world of peace and harmony”. The president said he authorized the killing of Soleimani in order to “prevent war” with Iran.

That authorization was given from his luxury beach mansion at Mar-a-Lago in Florida while he reportedly ate dinner of meatloaf and ice cream with a close circle of friends.

Trump claimed he had received “actionable intelligence” that Soleimani was preparing plots to kill hundreds of American diplomats and troops across the Middle East. That’s just U.S. intel voodoo logic for which evidence is never presented. He also said the Iranian general was responsible for “thousands” of American troop deaths and the death of “millions” of innocent people. That’s plain slander.

Depicting General Qasem Soleimani as a terrorist is the logical step in the American propaganda narrative that demonizes Iran as the “world’s top terror sponsor”. But that narrative is as bogus as American claims of virtue. The need to assassinate Soleimani’s character stems from the need for the Trump administration to justify its barbaric act of murder.

Trump’s claims about eradicating terrorists and his single-handed defeat of the IS caliphate in Syria and Iraq is the really “sick passion” here.

If it wasn’t for the strategic intervention of Iran led by Soleimani, as well as that of Russia, the war in Syria would have expanded the terror caliphate in that country and Iraq, and no doubt to other countries in the Middle East.

It was illegal U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – killing over one million people and destroying whole societies – that forged the pandemic disease of terrorism across the region. The Americans and their allies have utilized these terror groups for regime change operations.

Soleimani was not a mastermind of terrorism, as his American detractors allege. He was a mastermind of legitimate resistance against American illegal occupation and state-sponsored terrorism in the Middle East. The defeat of Islamic State and their assorted proxies in Syria and Iraq exposed the dirty war that the U.S. had orchestrated and its shambolic, hypocritical claims about “fighting terrorism”.

In a mark of respect, Russia’s Ministry of Defense paid homage to General Soleimani for his contribution to defeating terror groups in Syria and Iraq.

That is why Soleimani became such a hate-figure for Washington. He had thwarted the American imperialist agenda for subjugating the region according to its strategic desires.

Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are absurdly saying the U.S. doesn’t want a war with Iran. Pompeo has even said the White House is “trying to de-escalate tensions” with Tehran.

With cloying disingenuousness, the president said:

“I’ve deep respect for the Iranian people – they are a remarkable people with an incredible heritage and unlimited potential. We do not seek regime change. However, the Iranian regime’s aggression in the region, including the use of proxy fighters to destabilize its neighbors, must end and it must end now.”

Iranian regime’s aggression? This from a U.S. regime that is simultaneously bombing several countries, has tens of thousand of troops in the region, uses strangulating economic sanctions/warfare, rips up international arms control agreements, and has the blood of millions on its hands.

Hawkish former National Security Advisor John Bolton congratulated Trump over the assassination of Soleimani as the first step towards regime change.

Another hawkish acolyte Senator Lindsey Graham helped formulate the logic of war escalation, by stating: “If Iran continues to attack America and our allies, they should pay the heaviest of prices, which includes the destruction of their oil refineries.”

The U.S. under Donald Trump is caught up fatally in its own delusions and web of propaganda lies. A nation whose leader celebrates murder while attending an ecstatic church meeting is a nation that is doomed.

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Finian Cunningham, is a columnist at the Strategic Culture Foundation, Sputnik, and a Writer on Dandelion Salad. He can be reached at cunninghamfinian@gmail.com.

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From the archives:

The Iraq Embassy Revolt Portends to the Future of Class Struggle by Rainer Shea + Mike Prysner: No War on Iran! Troops Out of Iraq! (+ more)

America’s Lawless Arrogance Has Gone Too Far with the Assassination of Iran’s Top Military Commander, by Finian Cunningham + Why Did the U.S. Attack Iran? by Bruce Gagnon (+ more)

Impeachment: What Lies Beneath? by Jim Kavanagh

John Pilger: American Exceptionalism Driving World to War, interviewed by Finian Cunningham

Chris Hedges and Stephen Kinzer: War With Iran?

Iran, Hong Kong, and the Desperation of a Declining U.S. Empire by Rainer Shea

Idiots Driving World to War by Finian Cunningham