By Kambiz Zarrabi
January 24, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - It is so
noteworthy that any reference to the assassinated
Iranian commander of the IRGC, Soleimani, by
television commentators, and especially by the
members of our Congress and other government
officials, begins with the preamble that he was a
bad, bad actor who had the blood of so many
Americans on his hands. Why? Simple: Without
emphasizing that point they might not appear
"patriotic" enough!
The President and the Secretary of State have
referred to him as the world's worst terrorist in
charge of a terrorist organization that is the
terror arm of Iran, which is itself the world's
chief promoter of international terrorism. These
characterizations are now fully established in
everyone's mind, not to be questioned; and that's
that - case closed.
Even the Iranian/American so-called scholars
appearing as expert commentators during televised
interviews either concur with, or choose not to
question, the adjectives casually used in referring
to Soleimani, the IRGC, or the Islamic Republic of
Iran.
What's this all about? Let's ask a few questions:
Has the Islamic Republic of Iran been involved in
the affairs of the Middle East, from Afghanistan to
Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere? Remember, that's
Iran's own backyard. Yes, it has.
Has the IRGC's foreign operations arm, the Quds
Force, headed by General Soleimani, been the
principle element of Iran's attempt to promote its
interests in the region? Yes.
Have these operations also resulted in the deaths
of Americans, as well as many others, in the Middle
East theater of war? Yes.
So, Aren't these allegations, in fact, statements
of the truth? Yes, they are; but not the
whole truth. Partial truths could lead us to
unintended, but most often deliberately misleading,
conclusions!
Let's do a little comparison to better understand
this years-long drama:
Has the United States inserted itself for decades
in the affairs of the Middle East, half-way around
the world? Yes.
Have these involvements included the presence of
military forces, massive sales of arms, and the
creations of alliances of conveniences to serve
America's stated purpose? Yes.
Have these activities caused the deaths of
thousands of Americans, and of over a million local
people, in addition to a near total devastation of
the regional infrastructures and economies, from
Afghanistan all the way to the Mediterranean Sea?
Yes.
Now, let's set aside the cliché that one man's
terrorist is another man's hero or freedom-fighter,
and look at who General Soleimani was, whose
assassination the Iranian nation mourns, and Iran's
enemies celebrate:
The eight-year-war (1980-88) that Iraq's Saddam
Hussein waged against the fledgling Islamic Republic
of Iran soon after the hostage crisis, has
always been regarded by Iran as the "imposed war",
encouraged and supported by the Reagan
administration to bring Iran to its knees, as well
as to weaken Saddam's regime. The scheme was to be
followed by some kind of destabilization process to
reshape the pro-Iran Syrian government and the Shi'a
dominated Lebanon.
This was exactly what the drafters of the 1996
paper, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for
Securing the Realm, had foreseen. The
masterminds of that paper were well-known American
Zionist Neoconservatives who wrote the paper for
Benjamin Netanyahu during his first term as the
Israeli Prime Minister.
One year later, in 1997, the same group, plus
several other like-minded thinkers, came up with
The Project for the New American Century,
almost as though designed to follow through with the
"Clean Break" strategy.
I urge, I implore, the readers to search these
highlighted titles in Wikipedia to better understand
for whose benefit thousands of American servicemen
and women have paid the price with their blood, and
how many millions have lost their lives, injured or
made homeless in the Middle East; the region that
continues to smolder and ready to reignite in what
could be the Grand Opening of the Gates of Hell!
This is not another conspiratorial scenario: One of
the original drafters of the
Clean Break, and the principle architect
of the Iraq War,
David Wurmser, has just been
appointed by Trump to head the Iran Project.
(No one should doubt that the Iranian officials
are also well aware of all that and duly concerned
about the potential implementation of that
blueprint, which showed the collapse of the Islamic
Republic as its ultimate goal.)
One of the local heroes of the Iran/Iraq war was
a young soldier, Qassim Soleimani, who came close
several times to losing his life on the battle
front, especially when Saddam resorted to the use of
chemical weapons, as the Iranians were reversing
Saddam's gains and closing in on the outskirts of
Baghdad. He more than likely knew about Ronald
Reagan's comments when the American President was
told that the Iraqis were using chemical weapons:
"Well," Reagan was reported as responding: "an
Iranian victory is not acceptable."
After gaining in rank, Soleimani had played an
instrumental role in assisting the American
counterparts in overcoming the Taliban resistance
and to stabilize the new Karzai government in
Afghanistan in 2001, for which Iran was officially
credited and thanked for its efforts and cooperation
with the Americans.
Then came George W. Bush's State of the Union
address just a few months later, in February of
2002, during which he lumped Iran together with
North Korea and Iraq as the Axis of Evil!
I wrote about it in one of my many posted
articles at the time, and commented that I did not
believe George W. Bush had any idea what he was
reading; the speech was written by a Jewish Canadian
Zionist, David Frum, credited for inserting those
irrelevant words into that text; some say as an
afterthought!
That man has since been rewarded with high tenure
in several Zionist and Neocon think tanks, and makes
routine appearances on the mainstream media as a
writer and TV panelist. There is an old saying that
a nutcase can throw a pebble into a well, which
takes ten wise men to bring it back out! But the
damage was done, and there was no way to undo it.
A year later, the United States attacked and
occupied Iraq, supposedly under mistaken
intelligence reports. That wasn't the way the
Iranians were interpreting the episode. To them, the
American occupation of Iraq did not appear as an
intelligence error, but as a deliberate action and a
prelude to expanding America's presence and
influence from Iraq into Syria and, of course, Iran.
The removal of Saddam and his Sunny minority rule
opened the way for the dormant Shi'a majority in
Iraq to dominate the political scene, with the
United States helping to stabilize the new regime.
That at least was the official rationale given for
the continued occupation of Iraq. However, the
United States had other interests in Iraq, as well:
namely the control over the future fate of Iraq's
vast oil and gas reserves that lay mostly in the
liberated Iraqi Kurdistan.
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Meanwhile, the Iranian government saw a
new opportunity for establishing its
presence in Iraq, its fellow Shi'a neighbor,
to not just support the new ruling party,
but to ensure that the Americans, the
Saudis, and their principle proxy, the
opportunistic Mojahedin-e-Khalgh (MeK), as
well as certain Kurdish groups, do not
embark on any covert or overt operations
against Iran. Soleimani was in charge of the
IRGC operations to monitor and safeguard
against that. However, in spite of all
efforts, repeated acts of infiltration,
border clashes, and sabotage against Iranian
targets inside Iran continued to take place,
resulting in considerable damage and human
casualties. Similar events continue to this
day in the south-east and southern Iran by
terrorist groups encouraged, funded and
armed by the Saudis, which Iran believes
also include Israel's involvements.
The extraterritorial operations of the IRGC,
which became known as the Quds Force, also included
confronting and neutralizing known enemies of the
Islamic Republic, namely the Taliban, Al Gha'eda,
and later the Sunni Islamic State or ISIS.
Even though the Quds Force under General
Soleimani and the Americans were cooperating and
fighting the common enemy, the Islamic State, the
entrenchment of the American forces in Iraq next
door to Iran, especially against the backdrop of
continuing hostile regime-change rhetoric coming out
of Washington, kept Iran on the edge.
In addition to the threats posed by the presence
of the American forces in Iraq, as well as the
Saudi-backed Sunni militias, Iran was also
concerned, and quite correctly, with another player
on the stage; Israel. The joint American/Israeli
cyber attack, the Stuxnet computer virus, which had
targeted Iran's nuclear facilities in 2010, was
followed by the targeted assassinations of four
Iranian nuclear scientists in the streets of Tehran,
for which Israel in cooperation with the MeK
operatives was semi-admittedly responsible; but
thanks to "plausible deniability", neither was held
accountable for acts of international terrorism!
The Saudi regime's concerns about Iran's
increasing influence in the new Shi'a dominated Iraq
has not been so much over Sunni versus Shi'a
religious rivalry, but for pure and simple
economics. The competition still exists between the
potentials for a Qatar/Iran oil and gas pipeline
through Iran, Iraq and Syria to the European
markets, versus the competing Saudi line bypassing
Iran, which the United States openly favors.
In the middle of all the instability and mayhem,
the Sunni Arab block comprising the Arab Emirates
and the Saudi regime, took advantage of the
cancerous spread of an initially disparate local
Sunni cells in Iraq and Syria, and began funneling
funds and arms in their support. This was the early
phase of what became known as DAESH, ISIL or ISIS
movement (The Islamic State of Iraq, Syria and
Lebanon).
The destabilization of Syria with the intension
of collapsing the Assad government has long been
part of the "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for
Securing the Realm" masterplan mentioned above.
The growth and gradually better organized ISIS
groups created a problem for Assad's Iranian and
Russian allies. For Russia, Syria's strategic
Latakia port has been a vital access to the eastern
Mediterranean away from the contentious Black Sea
for its naval fleet. For Iran, alliance and
cooperation with the Assad government was important
as a hedge against Israeli adventurism through the
Golan area, as well as for providing a channel to
link Iran with the Lebanese increasingly more
powerful Hezbollah.
(Hezbollah has often been referred to as
Iran's proxy on the Middle East staging grounds.
An ally, yes, but a proxy it most certainly is
not! If we were to call Hezbollah Iran's proxy,
then America's Middle East allies are all
American proxies; and that would include Israel
and Saudi Arabia. Hezbollah was not a creation
of the Islamic Republic of Iran; it preexisted
the Iran's Islamic Revolution, and represents
the majority of Lebanon's population, the
Shi'ites. Since its role has been defending
Lebanon against Israeli incursions, and quite
successfully, it has understandably been the
recipient of Iran's military assistance; and for
the same reason, labeled as a terrorist group by
the United States on behest of Israel.)
It is quite puzzling why the ISIS networks in
Syria were regarded as anti-American. They were
definitely and principally anti-anything
non-Sunni-Moslem, which would include the main
Western presence in the Middle East, the United
States. However, their foremost objectives were to
depose the Assad rule, and fight Assad's supporters,
the Iranian Quds Force and the Russians.
These objectives actually coincided with
America's and Israel's own designs, except for the
fact that American forces were also targeted on many
occasions. This created a strategic dilemma for the
so-called "coalition of the willing" created to
fight ISIS groups who were committing visible crimes
and atrocities against their captives. So, the ISIS
cells were divided into two groups: the good
terrorists and the bad terrorists: the good ones,
who were now given new names, were fighting the
Assad forces, the Iranians and the Russians; and
were, therefore, encouraged and helped by the
"coalition" and the Israelis. The bad ones remained
as the real terrorists that continued to
fight the coalition forces.
General Soleimani and the Quds Force, as well as
the Hezbollah contingents, were involved in fighting
our "good" terrorists and, with Russia's help,
managed to prevent the Assad government from the
projected collapse.
It was in this chaotic and confusing mess that
Congresswoman, Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, herself a
two-terms Middle East war veteran, openly opposed
the American involvements in Syria and the larger
Middle East, engaged in counterproductive
regime-change operations, especially when these
involvements were not serving America's legitimate
best interests, but the agendas of the tail that has
been wagging the dog; Israel!
Ms. Gabbard, herself potentially a victim of
those same IEDs that the Iranian Quds Force under
the command of General Soleimani had provided for
the Iraqi militias, did not parrot the same line as
others in her televised interviews about Soleimani's
assassination. She, unlike too many of her
congressional colleagues, or the presidential
hopeful (actually hopeless), Amy Klobuchar, refuses
to
kiss ass or compromise her integrity for the
sake of her political ambitions!
Of course, we all understand that anyone who
doesn't like or respect us is, by our definition, at
the very best, wrong, and at worst, an evil
terrorist. This worldview is not exclusive to us; it
would perhaps help to appreciate that others feel
that way, too.
We have our radical conservative hawks as do the
Iranians in positions of power. We have genuine
war-mongers, such as Pompeo and Bolton, as do they.
We also have ambitious, opportunistic neocons, such
as Giuliani, Graham and Cotton; and so do they.
I find it sad, even tragic, that the Democrats
who oppose the Republican administration's
aggressive policies toward Iran do not do so because
they believe Iran does not deserve to be treated as
an enemy of the United States: No; they, just as
their Republican counterparts, are being wagged by
the same tail, but perhaps not so violently!
As the Iranian nation continues to suffer under
draconian unilateral sanctions by the American
administration, what is keeping the two sides from a
catastrophic military collision are the saner minds,
perhaps mostly among the military leaderships, who
understand the costs to all sides of such an
eventuality.
May saner minds prevail.
Kambiz Zarrabi has
devoted the last thirty-some years teaching,
lecturing and writing about US/Iran
relations. Previous to his retirement, his
career included working as
geologist/geophysicist in the oil and
minerals exploration industries with
American and Iranian firms and in the
private sector. His tenure included serving
at Iran's Ministry of Economy as the
Director General of Mines in the late 60s
and early 70s. He received his college
education at the University of California in
Los Angeles, graduating in 1960.
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This article was originally published by "Payvand"
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© Copyright 2020
NetNative
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