The Long Planned U.S.
Assassinations In Iraq Will Increase Its
Political Chaos
By Moon Of Alabama
January 13, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
The Trump administration has
given various justification for its assassination of
Major General Qassem Soleimani and commander Abu
Mahdi al Muhandis. It claimed that there was an
'imminent threat' of an incident, even while not
knowing what, where or when it would happen, that
made the assassination necessary. Trump later said
the thread was a planned bombing of four U.S.
embassies. His defense secretary denied that.
That has raised the suspicion that the decision
to kill Soleimani had little to do with current
events but was a long planned operation. NBC
News now
reports that this is exactly the case:
President Donald Trump authorized the killing of
Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani seven months
ago if Iran's increased aggression resulted in
the death of an American, according to five
current and former senior administration
officials.
The presidential directive in June came with
the condition that Trump would have final
signoff on any specific operation to kill
Soleimani, officials said.
The idea to kill Soleimani, a regular General in
an army with which the U.S. is not war, came like
many other bad ideas from John Bolton.
|
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
|
After Iran shot down a U.S. drone in June, John
Bolton, Trump's national security adviser at the
time, urged Trump to retaliate by signing off on
an operation to kill Soleimani, officials said.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also wanted Trump
to authorize the assassination, officials said.
But Trump rejected the idea, saying he'd take
that step only if Iran crossed his red line:
killing an American. The president's message was
"that's only on the table if they hit
Americans," according to a person briefed on the
discussion.
Then unknown forces fired 30 short range missiles
into a U.S. base near Kirkuk. The salvo was
not intended to kill or wound anyone:
The rockets landed in a place and at a time when
American and Iraqi personnel normally were not
there and it was only by unlucky chance that Mr.
Hamid was killed, American officials said.
Without presenting any evidence the U.S. accused
Katib Hizbullah, an Iraqi Popular Militia Unit, of
having launched the missiles. It launched airstrikes
against a number of Katib Hizbullah positions near
the Syrian border, hundreds of miles away from
Kirkuk, and killed over 30 Iraqi security forces.
This led to demonstrations in Baghdad during
which a crowd breached the outer wall of the U.S.
embassy but soon retreated. Trump, who had attacked
Hillary Clinton over the raid on the consulate/CIA
station in Benghazi, did not want to get embarrassed
with a full embassy breach.
The media claim that it was the embassy breach
that the led to the activation of an operation that
had already been planned for a year before Trump
signed off on it seven month ago. As the New
York Times
describes it:
For the past 18 months, officials said, there
had been discussions about whether to target
General Suleimani. Figuring that it would be too
difficult to hit him in Iran, officials
contemplated going after him during one of his
frequent visits to Syria or Iraq and focused on
developing agents in seven different entities to
report on his movements — the Syrian Army, the
Quds Force in Damascus, Hezbollah in Damascus,
the Damascus and Baghdad airports and the Kataib
Hezbollah and Popular Mobilization forces in
Iraq.
It was the embassy breach and a war-industry
lobbyist who convinced Trump
to finally pull the symbolical trigger:
Defense Secretary Mark Esper presented a series
of response options to the president two weeks
ago, including killing Soleimani. Esper
presented the pros and cons of such an operation
but made it clear that he was in favor of taking
out Soleimani, officials said.
Trump signed off and it further developed from
there.
There was no intelligence of any 'imminent
threat' or anything like that.
This was an operation that had been worked on for
18 month. Trump signed off on it more than half a
year ago. Those who had planned it just waited for a
chance to execute it.
We can not even be sure that the embassy bombing
had caused Trump to give the final go. It might have
been that the CIA and Pentagon were just waiting for
a chance to kill Soleimani and Muhandis, the leader
of Katib Hizbullah, at the same time. Their meeting
at Baghdad airport was not secret and provided the
convenient opportunity they had been waiting for.
Together Soleimani and Muhandis were the glue
that kept the many Shia factions in Iraq together.
The armed ones as well as the political ones.
Soleimani's replacement as Quds brigade leader,
Brigadier General Ismail Qaani, is certainly a
capable man. But his previous field of work was
mainly east of Iran in Afghanistan and Pakistan and
it will be difficult for him to
fill Soleimani's role in Iraq:
After Soleimani’s death, Ayatollah Khamenei
appointed Soleimani’s deputy Ismail Qaani to
succeed him. Qaani does not speak Arabic, does
not have an in-depth knowledge of Iraq, nor the
insight of Soleimani and his ability to balance
the different positions of Iraq’s factions with
the opinions of Ayatollah Khamenei and the
religious authorities in Najaf.
The question is how the successor of
Soleimani will manage his new responsibility
including the thorny issues in Iraq. The
escalation of the Iranian-American conflict is,
according to many, an escalation towards war and
the destabilization of the region in which the
rules of engagement have changed. The question
remains how, and not whether all of this will
impact the situation in Iraq.
Today the Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who has
his on militia, and Iraqi PMU leaders
met in Qom, Iran, to discuss how the foreign
troops can be expelled from Iraq. Gen. Qaani will
likely be there to give them advice.
Yesterday Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the
Lebanese Hizbullah,
gave another speech. In it he called on the
Kurds in Iraq to pay back their debt to Soleimani
and Hizbullah, which is owned for their fight
against ISIS, and to help to evict the foreign
soldiers from Iraq:
85-Nasrallah: Now, the rest of the path. 1)
Iraq: Iraq is the first country concerned
w/responding to this crime, because it happened
in Iraq, and because it targeted Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis,
a great Iraqi commander, and because Soleimani
defended Iraq.
86-Nasrallah: I ask Masoud Barazani to thank
Soleimani for his efforts in defending Erbil and
Kurdistan Region, because Soleimani was the only
one to respond to your call. Soleimani and with
him men from Hezbollah went to Erbil.
87-Nasrallah: Barazani was shaking from fear,
but Soleimani and the brothers from Hezbollah
helped you repulse this unprecedented threat;
and now you must repay this good by being part
of the effort to expel the Americans from Iraq
and the region.
The Barzani family, which governs the Kurdish
part of Iraq, has
since long sold out to the Zionists and the
United States. It will certainly not support the
resistance effort. But Nasrallah's request is highly
embarrassing to the clan and to Masoud Barzani
personally.
So far I only found this rather confusing
response from him:
Nihad N. Arafat @NihadArafat -
7:44 UTC · Jan 13, 2020
The Kurdistan Regional Government’s response
to the immoral speech uttered by Hassan
Nasrallah through the anti-terror apparatus is a
clear message from the regional government to
those terrorists that the response to the
terrorists must be through the anti-terror
apparatus.
As military leader both Soleimani and Muhandis
are certainly replaceable. The militia groups they
created and led will continue to function.
But both men also played important political
roles in Iraq and it will take some time to find
adequate people to replace them in that. That makes
it likely that the already simmering political
situation in Iraq will soon boil over as the Shia
factions will start to fight each other over the
selection of a new Prime Minister and government.
The U.S. will welcome that as it will try do
install a candidate that will reject the Iraqi
parliament decision to remove the foreign forces
from Iraqi grounds.
This article was
originally published by "Moon
Of Alabama" -
Do you agree or disagree? Post
your comment here
==See Also==
