While most establishment voices have cheered the assassination of Gen. Soleimani, a recent CounterPunch article has a much better take on Soleimani’s role in the GWOT era.
From the article:
“As Soleimani moved about openly in Iraq, U.S. commanders did not attack him because he did not attack them. Sometimes, pro-American and pro-Iranian soldiers even fought side by side. Thanks to this tacit U.S.-Iranian cooperation that neither country cared to publicly acknowledge, ISIS was expelled from Iraq into Syria by 2017.”
From Washington’s perspective, Gen. Soleimani’s greatest offense was defeating the CIA’s Operation Timber Sycamore in Syria, conceived by Bush and Saudi Prince Bandar bin-Sultan, implemented by President Obama.
Basically, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia conspired for the second time in our history to create a Mujaheddin Army, flooding Syria with thousands of CIA-armed-and-coordinated Salafist militants, predominately al Qaeda, in order to effect regime-change in a nation at peace.
Thanks to Operation Timber Sycamore, Syria became Obama’s Iraq, resulting in over half-a-million deaths and over 10 million refugees, after Washington’s proxy-invasion failed, leaving the country devastated — and the regime in Damascus more popular than ever: the protector of Syrian minority populations, the regime that defeated a foreign invasion and strengthened its alliance with regional and international partners.
Also from the CounterPunch article:
“Soleimani helped defeat ISIS and Al-Qaeda in Syria’s civil war. In 2015, President Bashar al-Assad’s armed forces were losing ground to Sunni fundamentalist forces funded by the CIA and the Persian Gulf oil monarchies. The CIA wanted to overthrow Assad. Iran feared losing its ally in Damascus to a hostile anti-Shia regime controlled by al-Qaeda.”
All Donald Trump has done is murder the most effective enemy that al Qaeda and ISIS ever had.
He’s caved to his political enemies, the neocons, as we always feared he would, risking another catastrophic war in the Middle East, one that threatens to descend into a third World War, as Russia and China have been engaging in joint military exercises for the first time in history (as Washington has threatened all three with annihilation in the post-9/11 era, bringing them into an alliance against the most genocidal nation since Nazi Germany, the post-Cold War USA).
I still believe that between Sec. Clinton and Donald Trump, Trump was the clear *lesser* of two fairly obvious, reprehensible evils (not someone I could vote for, but clearly less dangerous and authoritarian than his rival and former family friend).
But this latest action on Trump’s part was extremely reckless and may prove to be far more self-destructive to the U.S. than the illegal invasion of Iraq, which resulted in over a million deaths.
As Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has said, assassinating Soleimani in Iraq was unconstitutional, counterproductive, and has dramatically decreased our national security, rather than enhancing it.
All Trump has done is murder a frequent strategic ally of the U.S. military in Iraq, an invited guest of Iraq’s government, and an unrelenting foe of al Qaeda, ISIS, and the neocons who’ve been backing their genocidal butchery in the region.
NOT a smart move, and NOT consistent with Trump’s promises to pull back from the neocon agenda that’s killed several million Muslims in a modern holocaust.