An article in SF Bay View magazine.
by Diana Johnstone
Jan. 4, 2020 – The criminal assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani was not only an act of war, it was an act of low treachery and crass stupidity. Among the self-justifying lies, leaders of the perpetual war regime in Washington claim that locating the targeted military leader was a brilliant accomplishment of U.S. intelligence.
Not at all! The Lebanese newspaper Al-Binaa reports that the Americans were routinely informed of Soleimani’s arrival in Baghdad simply because he was an official visitor, invited as military advisor to the Iraqi government. U.S. forces are responsible for Baghdad airport security. So they had to know since they were responsible … for the security of an official honored guest.
This should give all U.S. allies an uneasy feeling about the implications of American “protection” of their “security.”
Of course, leaders of the NATO satellites and their media propaganda machines largely pretend to believe Uncle Sam’s big lies: The general had to be killed to “save American lives,” the only lives that count, especially when they are in somebody else’s country killing people whom Israel doesn’t like.
French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the assassination in a telephone conversation. We don’t know what they said, but it is reasonable to suppose that this can only hasten a shift in French foreign policy desired by many in the nation’s policy elite. Fear of the monster creates a dilemma between submission and escape.
The United States has brazenly murdered the war hero of a sovereign nation whose military action has been devoted to defending his own nation (since the U.S.-instigated Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s) and his region from Saudi-backed Sunni fanatics, in the guise of Daech or al Qaeda.
Those fanatics have been openly instrumentalized by Israel to further the notorious Oded Yinon plan to break up all Arab states into small units, the better to ensure Israel’s domination of the region. It matters to non-Arab Shi’ite Iran because it incites armed Sunni fanatics to attack Shi’ites in Syria and other places.
Civilized peoples are capable of respect for their adversaries. A noble warrior on one side can respect a noble warrior on the other side. But there is no respect for anything human in a bunch of machines directed by morons.
When the U.S. murders a military strategist more successful than their own grotesquely over-armed losers, Pentagon apologists pretend that he (and not they) is the bloodthirsty killer spreading chaos throughout the Middle East. If any honest history is written in the future, on the scale of barbarism versus civilization, contemporary U.S presidents will rank somewhere well below Attila the Hun, who at least faced his enemies in battle.
Diana Johnstone is an American political writer based in Paris. She can be reached at diana.johnstone (at) wanadoo.fr.