OPINION: Kicking the Hornet’s Nest from Afar
“It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.” — George Washington
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I’m glad I decided to hold off talking about the assassination of General Qassem Suleimani for about a week … I knew this stir up was not going to take full-form until the controversy had time to ruminate. Lo and behold, the plot thickens as a 737 commercial airliner from Tehran to Kiev comes crashing down to earth, only this time it isn’t Boeing’s fault. It’s times like these when we writers get discouraged by the futility of it all.
To no surprise, I’ve heard a lot of arguments about the developing topic of the recently-escalated tensions so far … a few are built on solid ground while most others are complete and utter horseshit. But I resent nobody beyond the Don and his henchmen for that … there’s too many cooks in the kitchen to accurately and intelligently call shots before they land. Because, for every country with its finger in Iran’s pie, there’s a dozen more proxy militias also trying to budge into the mix.
Most of these discussions come back to a popular base question: how will this affect the Don’s presidency. And though this is certainly a question to give some thought towards, my internalized panic attack keeps returning to the question of why nobody is calling out the hypocrisy in the Don’s decision to unify American sentiment towards going to war with Iran.
Just like the Don’s decision on October 13, 2019 to pull U.S. forces from northern Syria, whom were stationed there to protect the Kurdish people from a Turkish or Islamic State incursion, it was one made in the middle of a major stage in the impeachment proceedings that are aimed against him. That earlier decision was made right before Trump’s top Russia advisor, Fiona Hill, was about to be interviewed by three different Democratic House panels behind closed doors.
The October 2019 decision was a strategic maneuver met with public dismay from Republican lawmakers like Lindsey Graham, R- S.C., many of which considered it to be the worst decision of the Don’s presidency thus far. But, Republican sentiment towards escalated conflict in Syria is a different story today than it was in October of last year. Walk a mile in the GOP’s shoes and the mentality becomes palpable: in October, it wasn’t as proof-positive that the Don may have screwed the pooch, so there wasn’t a reason for the senate to feel protective.
Today, the Republican-majority Senate is preparing their proceedings for the impeachment trial and diehard GOP sock puppets are currently rallying around the Don’s war crime. Any republican senators who have been on the fence about the Don’s guilt no longer have a shadowy corner in the capitol building to hide in. They have all been corralled together ideologically, thickly sewn together with a mortar made of Islamophobia and shares in Lockheed Martin. In short, the Don’s choice to off Suleimani boosted his merit as commander in chief in the eyes of the republicans, and will likely be the pivot point for improving his chances at reelection while also protecting him from a 2/3rds majority vote of guilty in the senate.
However, at writing, Fox News is sending mixed signals. Graham thinks the decision to drone strike Suleimani and his advisor/deputy commander of the Iran-backed Popular Mobilisation Forces, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, was a wise move, going so far as to threatening Iranian television viewers. But, the darling mouthpiece of Fox News, Tucker Carlson, has proved again like he has sparingly in the past to be the only person working for the network with anything even remotely resembling a spine by bashing the Don’s decision.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are scrambling and falling apart at the seams. The Bernie’s and AOC’s of the government are up in arms and wrought with unsound reasoning, while the Biden’s and Buttigeig’s of this great land are lacing up their boots and liquidating assets so they can collect all the war bonds money will buy. The Don has once again thrown a nasty bitch of a railroad spike into the presidential election. He’s clearly dividing the voters through strong-arm methods which force them into making their decision along the basis of how each candidate will view this war. But, by that time, who even knows where we’ll be in this shit show and what the sentiment will be from terrified Americans towards the Don. Of course, that’s likely just the tip of the iceberg in this whole kerfuffle.
In the president’s own words, “we took action last night to stop a war, we did not take action to start a war.” Supposedly, key intelligence existed to show that Suleimani was making advances on a violent campaign against U.S. diplomats and military officials operating within the region. It was a preventative action, not an escalatory action.
Is it just me, or does this all sound oddly familiar?
History repeats itself, and it looks like the Don is willfully entering another war with Iran’s many scattered, decentralized forces. The craziest thing though is that one could easily imagine he is doing so by pulling an almost identical rabbit from a hat that sits right next to the one George Bush, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell all pulled from. In other words, I have heavy skepticism that no imminent threat existed at all, and that the hawks that circle the skies of Washington have fabricated yet another spiritual successor to the WMD scare that got us into the Iraq war.
In the wake of 9/11, Bush’s approval rating skyrocketed, with a percentage around 51% when he was first elected and capping-off at 90% by Sep. 22 of 2001 … and why? Because patriotism … Mueller’s “Rally Round the Flag” theory … a crisis always unites the people. The same thing happened for FDR following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor … 72% to 84% in under a week. And when President Obama carried out the Seal Team 6 operation that ended the life of Osama Bin Laden, his approval rating went from 46% to 52% within three days.
It appears to the cynics and assholes of America, myself included, that the Don naivishly expected a greater sense of nationalism to arise from the assassination of a figure connected to the death of Americans. The hawks in the U.S. state department and the Pentagon have been looking under every boulder across the planet for an excuse to go to war with Iran since the 1970s. But, here’s where the plan of using Suleimani as a scapegoat fell short: nobody in the states knew who Suleimani was until they killed him!
The Streisand Effect is now in full swing here in the U.S., but to the Iranians, the sacred calf has been slaughtered and its blood is on America’s hands now. At Suleimani’s funeral procession, a stampede of mourners lead to a still-increasing death count of 50 civilians in a crowd of millions.
Iran is a country with a long-standing history of instability. The Iranian Revolution of 1978 brought forth a temporary power vacuum of which it has since escaped but still feels the effects of. The Don’s decision in 2017 to pull-out of the Joint Comprehensive Point of Action … better known as the JCPOA or Iran nuclear deal … has had the heaviest effect on the country’s economic, social and political stability in recent years. Their government structure is itself messy and confusing, with much of it decentralized and redundant. Iran has both a president (Hassan Rouhani) as well as a supreme leader (Ali Khamenei), and it’s still unclear to most of the world’s leaders as to which one is the voice of authority.
Where it all comes full-circle though is that Iran often relies on proxy militias to carry out military strategy and operations, which is what got Suleimani the reputation he had because he was the spearhead of unifying these militias. While it can unquestionably be argued that some of these proxy militias did a lot of harm and collateral damage to the region, at the same time they successfully and significantly pushed back the Islamic State from both Iran and Iraq under Suleimani’s direction. And, in case you didn’t know, ISIS isn’t anywhere close to everyone in the Middle East’s favorite group of rag-tags, let alone Iranians and Iraqis.
Do you see it now? How the Don unintentionally gave Iran a unifying figure? Suleimani is tantamount to a Christ-figure now … a martyr through which deeper Iranian resentment towards the U.S. will surely grow. But then again, what do I know? I’m just a wanton, frustrated millennial with a hunger for some god damn peace and quiet, but the world around me will always be as manic as it was the day prior. So, strap-in folks, and try not to get discouraged when you inevitably find yourself scratching your head in utter confusion at what the absolute fuck is going on. 2020 is off with a bang, just like New Years Eve and the day before and so on.
