January 03, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
The United States is now at war with Iran
in a conflict that could easily have been
avoided and it will not end well. There will
be no declaration of war coming from either
side, but the
assassination of Iranian Quds Force
Commander General Qassem Soleimani and
the head of Kata’ib Hezbollah Abu Mehdi
Muhandis by virtue of a Reaper drone strike
in Baghdad will shift the long-simmering
conflict between the two nations into high
gear. Iran cannot let the killing of a
senior military officer
go unanswered even though it cannot
directly confront the United States
militarily. But there will be reprisals and
Tehran’s suspected use of proxies to stage
limited strikes will now be replaced by more
damaging actions that can be directly
attributed to the Iranian government. As
Iran has significant resources locally, one
can expect that the entire Persian Gulf
region will be destabilized.
And there is also the terrorism card,
which will come into play. Iran has an
extensive diaspora throughout much of the
Middle East and, as it has been threatened
by Washington for many years, it has had a
long time to prepare for a war to be fought
largely in the shadows. No American
diplomat, soldier or even tourists in the
region should consider him or herself to be
safe, quite the contrary. It will be an
“open season” on Americans. The U.S. has
already ordered a partial evacuation of the
Baghdad Embassy and has advised all American
citizens to leave the country immediately.
Donald Trump rode to victory in 2016 on a
promise to end the useless wars in the
Middle East, but he has now demonstrated
very clearly that he is a liar. Instead of
seeking detente, one of his first actions
was to end the JCPOA nuclear agreement and
re-introduce sanctions against Iran. In a
sense, Iran has from the beginning been the
exception to Trump’s no-new-war pledge, a
position that might reasonably be directly
attributed to his incestuous relationship
with the American Jewish community and in
particular derived from his pandering to the
expressed needs of Israel’s belligerent
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
