This is an excellent, well articulated, truthful, illuminating, and incredibly important article. When I heard NPR start to go into what a bad person Soleimani was, thus towing the corporate and military industrial complex propaganda justifying his assassination, I just had to turn off the radio in disgust. I am outraged by the massive deadly propaganda of the American corporate funded media. Just sickened and mad as hell! This is the exact propaganda that fuels and perpetuates endless wars and the three evils Martin Luther King named decades ago of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. Just insane to consciously or unconsciously promote the lies that have long been killing and displacing millions worldwide forever. Makes me furious! And under all my fury is an ocean of grief for all the profound suffering of humans and nonhumans that are impacted by this senseless violence.
IT’S TIME FOR US IN AMERICA TO OWN OUR SHADOW AND SAY NO TO WAR, NO TO MILITARISM, NO TO THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, NO TO THE AMERICAN EMPIRE THAT HAS BEEN BUILT ON THE BLOOD OF OTHERS IN OUR COUNTRY AND WORLDWIDE! NO MORE!
It’s my belief that we will come to this place of refusing to be complicit with the military industrial complex and the pathological wealthy interests that fuel war and militarism by countering the relentless propaganda that we’re immersed in with TRUTH.
And so I share this deeply painful and disturbing, but incredibly important article today. May we all become fiercely and courageously committed to seeking the truth. The well-being of all the children of all the species everywhere is dependent upon our growing consciousness and awakening. 🙏 Molly
By Ryan Cooper
Donald Trump drastically escalated the United States' ongoing conflict with Iran on Thursday night by ordering the assassination of Iran's General Qassem Soleimani with an airstrike on the Baghdad International Airport. It takes what was arguably already a war (with an economic blockade and regular skirmishes with Iranian proxy forces) to a straight-up shooting war.
Events like this bring out the absolute worst in the American foreign policy community. Many conservative writers and thinkers, including former National Security Adviser John Bolton, the Hudson Institute's Michael Doran, and Commentary's Noah Rothman, openly cheered this Putin-style cold-blooded murder of a foreign statesman. Other more supposedly nonpartisan commentators uncritically parroted Trump administration assertions that Iran was planning something bad. Every top Democratic presidential candidate except Bernie Sanders was careful to foreground that Soleimani was a bad guy before condemning the assassination in their initial comments.
The truth is that Soleimani was not all that different from any of about five dozen current and former American politicians and bureaucrats — if anything, he was considerably more restrained about the use of force. Yes, he was involved in a lot of bloody wars — but so was every American president since 2000, and besides half the wars he fought in were started or fueled by the United States. It's just another instance of America's gigantic hypocrisy when it comes to war.
As writer Derek Davison explains, Soleimani was no ordinary general. He was more like a cross between the American vice president and the secretary of state — one of the two or three most famous and powerful people in Iran behind Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Soleimani commanded the Quds Force, a Special Forces-type operation supporting Iranian allies in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and many other countries. American hardliners hate him mainly for supporting Hezbollah and Hamas, and for arming insurgents who fought the American occupation of Iraq. Incidentally, as recently as September 2015, Trump plainly had no idea whatsoever who Soleimani was. Indeed, as Mehdi Hasan writes at The Intercept, when Hugh Hewitt asked him about the Quds Force, he thought Hewitt had said "Kurds."
So yes, Soleimani has fueled a lot of nasty conflicts and killed a lot of people, directly or indirectly, many of them American soldiers — though it's worth noting also that much of his recent effort has been dedicated to fighting ISIS (with great effectiveness, by all accounts) in a tacit uneasy alliance with U.S. forces.
Yet even the worst of Soleimani's record pales in comparison with the most blood-drenched American warmongers. If Soleimani deserves condemnation for arming Iraqi insurgents, then George W. Bush and Dick Cheney deserve 10 times as much for starting the war in the first place. It was a pointless, illegal war of aggression sold on lies that obliterated Iraqi society and killed perhaps half a million people, almost all of them innocent civilians. (Our own Soleimani, General David Petraeus, was connected to the operation of Iraqi torture dungeons and paramilitary death squads during the fight against the insurgency.)
If Soleimani deserves blame for helping Bashar al-Assad brutally defeat Syrian rebels, Henry Kissinger deserves 10 times as much for orchestrating the bombing slaughter of perhaps a quarter million Cambodians and paving the way for the Khmer Rouge genocide that killed 1.7 million people.
If any accused war criminal at an airport is fair game, then there are a lot of people in D.C. and Northern Virginia who better start traveling by train or ship.
Please continue this article here: https://theweek.com/articles/887283/america-guilty-everything-accuse-iran-doing
