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The assassination and the U.S.'s decision not to do it covertly was designed to elicit a reaction, that reaction now gives the U.S. a pretext for war. They've wanted control over Iran and the Iranian oil for longer than most have us have been alive.
"The opposite of love, after all, is not hate, but indifference."
It's all gone off in Iran / Iraq..... on 07:39 - Jan 8 by BrianMcCarthy
Inevitable.
The assassination and the U.S.'s decision not to do it covertly was designed to elicit a reaction, that reaction now gives the U.S. a pretext for war. They've wanted control over Iran and the Iranian oil for longer than most have us have been alive.
And a convenient diversion away from the ongoing impeachment proceedings. I’d hazard a guess that Trump’s strong man act will play well with his core support in the US.
Feel sorry for the innocent victims on both sides. And you can be sure there will be plenty of innocent civilians caught up in this sh1t show.
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It's all gone off in Iran / Iraq..... on 08:08 - Jan 8 with 3973 views
It's all gone off in Iran / Iraq..... on 07:39 - Jan 8 by BrianMcCarthy
Inevitable.
The assassination and the U.S.'s decision not to do it covertly was designed to elicit a reaction, that reaction now gives the U.S. a pretext for war. They've wanted control over Iran and the Iranian oil for longer than most have us have been alive.
and a good distraction from the impending impeachment proceedings.
How many more will die as we give control to venal mediocrities?
I see Raab has denounced the retaliation, if not the assassination.
Venal.
Mediocrity.
As Chris Hedge's wrote, maybe the best we can hope for is to limit the damage they do.
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It's all gone off in Iran / Iraq..... on 08:14 - Jan 8 with 3942 views
It's all gone off in Iran / Iraq..... on 08:20 - Jan 8 by Watford_Ranger
I doubt Raab is bright enough to know Iran and Iraq aren’t the same thing yet.
As he worked for the PLO as part of their negotiating team on the Oslo accords, I very much doubt that. But believe what you like.
His condemnation of the Iranian attack was inevitable as there were British troops at the base, at the invitation of the Iraqi government. As it is, no-one was hurt, but the Iranians can claim they killed 80 Americans. Win-win this time, maybe?
[Post edited 8 Jan 2020 9:14]
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It's all gone off in Iran / Iraq..... on 08:52 - Jan 8 with 3827 views
C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, the U.S. assassination of Iran’s Quds Force commander Qassim Suleimani has reaffirmed Washington’s long-held obsession with Tehran and its clerical regime, which goes all the way back to the late 1970s. What is the conflict between U.S. and Iran all about, and does the assassination of Suleimani constitute an act of war?
Noam Chomsky: Act of war? Perhaps we can settle on reckless international terrorism. It seems that Trump’s decision, on a whim, appalled high Pentagon officials who briefed him on options, on pragmatic grounds. If we wish to look beyond, we might ask how we would react in comparable circumstances.
Suppose that Iran were to murder the second-highest U.S. official, its top general, in the Mexico City international airport, along with the commander of a large part of the U.S.-supported army of an allied nation. Would that be an act of war? Others can decide. It is enough for us to recognize that the analogy is fair enough, and that the pretexts put forth by Washington collapse so quickly on examination that it would be embarrassing to run through them.
Suleimani was greatly respected – not only in Iran, where he was a kind of cult figure. This is recognized by U.S. experts on Iran. One of the most prominent experts, Vali Nasr (no dove, and who detests Suleimani), says that Iraqis, including Iraqi Kurds, “don’t see him as the nefarious figure that the West does, but they see him through the prism of defeating ISIS.” They have not forgotten that when the huge, heavily armed U.S.-trained Iraqi army quickly collapsed, and the Kurdish capital of Erbil, then Baghdad and all of Iraq were about to fall in the hands of ISIS [also known as Daesh], it was Suleimani and the Iraqi Shia militias he organized that saved the country. Not a small matter.
As for what the conflict is all about, the background reasons are not obscure. It has long been a primary principle of U.S. foreign policy to control the vast energy resources of the Middle East: to control, not necessarily to use. Iran has been central to this objective during the post-World War II period, and its escape from the U.S. orbit in 1979 has accordingly been intolerable.
The “obsession” can be traced to 1953, when Britain – the overlord of Iran since oil was discovered there – was unable to prevent the government from taking over its own resources and called on the global superpower to manage the operation. There is no space to review the course of the obsession since in detail, but some highlights are instructive.
Britain called on Washington with some reluctance. To do so meant surrendering more of its former empire to the U.S. and declining even more to the role of “junior partner” in global management, as the foreign office recognized with dismay. The Eisenhower administration took over. It organized a military coup that overthrew the parliamentary regime and re-installed the Shah, restoring the oil concession to its rightful hands, with the U.S. taking over 40 percent of the former British concession. Interestingly, Washington had to force U.S. majors to accept this gift; they preferred to keep to cheaper Saudi oil (which the U.S. had taken over from Britain in a mini war during World War II). But under government coercion, they were forced to comply: one of those unusual but instructive incidents revealing how the government sometimes pursues long-term imperial interests over the objections of the powerful corporate sector that largely controls and even staffs it – with considerable resonance in U.S.-Iran relations in recent years.
The Shah proceeded to institute a harsh tyranny. He was regularly cited by Amnesty International as a leading practitioner of torture, always with strong U.S. support as Iran became one of the pillars of U.S. power in the region, along with the Saudi family dictatorship and Israel. Technically, Iran and Israel were at war. In reality, they had extremely close relations, which surfaced publicly after the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. The tacit relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia are surfacing much more clearly now within the framework of the reactionary alliance that the Trump administration is forging as a base for U.S. power in the region: the Gulf dictatorships, the Egyptian military dictatorship and Israel, linked to Modi’s India, Bolsonaro’s Brazil and other similar elements. A rare semblance of a coherent strategy in this chaotic administration. The Carter administration strongly supported the Shah until the last moment. High U.S. officials – [Henry] Kissinger, [Dick] Cheney, [Donald] Rumsfeld – called on U.S. universities (mainly my own, MIT, over strong student protest but faculty acquiescence) to aid the Shah’s nuclear programs, even after he made clear that he was seeking nuclear weapons. When the popular uprising overthrew the Shah, the Carter administration was apparently split on whether to endorse the advice of de facto Israeli Ambassador Uri Lubrani, who counselled that “Tehran can be taken over by a very relatively small force, determined, ruthless, cruel. I mean the men who would lead that force will have to be emotionally geared to the possibility that they’d have to kill ten thousand people.” It didn’t work, and soon Ayatollah Khomeini took over on an enormous wave of popular enthusiasm, establishing the brutal clerical autocracy that still reigns, crushing popular protests.
Shortly after, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran with strong U.S. backing, unaffected by his resort to chemical weapons that caused huge Iranian casualties; his monstrous chemical warfare attacks against Iraqi Kurds were denied by Reagan, who sought to blame Iran and blocked congressional condemnation.
Finally, the U.S. pretty much took over, sending naval forces to ensure Saddam’s control of the Gulf. After the U.S. guided missile cruiser Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian airliner in a clearly marked commercial corridor, killing 290 passengers and returning to port to great acclaim and awards for exceptional service, Khomeini capitulated, recognizing that Iran cannot fight the U.S. President Bush then invited Iraqi nuclear scientists to Washington for advanced training in nuclear weapons production, a very serious threat against Iran.
Conflicts continued without a break, in more recent years focusing on Iran’s nuclear programs. These conflicts ended (in theory) with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015, an agreement between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN, plus Germany, in which Iran agreed to sharply curtail its nuclear programs – none of them weapons programs – in return for Western concessions. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which carries out intensive inspections, reports that Iran fully lived up to the agreement. U.S. intelligence agrees.
The topic elicits much debate, unlike another question: Has the U.S. observed the agreement? Apparently not. The JCPOA states that all participants are committed not to impede in any way Iran’s reintegration into the global economy, particularly the global financial system, which the U.S. effectively controls. The U.S. is not permitted to interfere “in areas of trade, technology, finance and energy” and others.
While these topics are not investigated, it appears that Washington has been interfering steadily.
President Trump claims that his effective demolition of the JCPOA is an effort to negotiate an improvement. It’s a worthy objective, easily realized. Any concerns about Iranian nuclear threats can be overcome by establishing a nuclear weapons-free zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East, with intensive inspections like those successfully implemented under the JCPOA.
As we have discussed before, this is quite straightforward. Regional support is overwhelming. The Arab states initiated the proposal long ago, and continue to agitate for it, with the strong support of Iran and the former nonaligned countries (G-77, now 132 countries). Europe agrees. In fact, there is only one barrier: the U.S., which regularly vetoes the proposal when it comes up at the review meetings of the Non-Proliferation Treaty countries, most recently by Obama in 2015. The U.S. will not permit inspection of Israel’s enormous nuclear arsenal, or even concede its existence, though it is not in doubt. The reason is simple: under U.S. law (the Symington Amendment), conceding its existence would require terminating all aid to Israel.
So the simple method of ending the alleged concern about an Iranian threat is ruled out and the world must face grim prospects.
Since these topics are scarcely mentionable in the U.S., it is perhaps worthwhile to reiterate another forbidden matter: The U.S. and U.K. have a special responsibility to work to establish a NWFZ in the Middle East. They are formally committed to do so under Article 14 of UN Security Council Resolution 687, which they invoked in their effort to concoct some thin legal basis for their invasion of Iraq, claiming that Iraq had violated the Resolution with nuclear weapons programs. Iraq hadn’t, as they were soon forced to concede. But the U.S. continues to violate the Resolution to the present in order to protect its Israeli client and to allow Washington to violate U.S. law.
Interesting facts, which, unfortunately, are apparently too incendiary to see the light of day.
There’s no point reviewing the years that followed in the hands of the man “sent by God to save Israel from Iran,” in the words of the serious figure of the administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Returning to the original question, there’s quite a lot to contemplate about what the conflict is about. In a phrase, primarily imperial power, damn the consequences.
From what I've read Iran have had their retaliation, but caused no casualties. Hopefully there is a chance that both sides can walk away at this point. As long as nobody says or does anything stupid.
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It's all gone off in Iran / Iraq..... on 14:21 - Jan 8 with 3400 views
Both sides are stupid and dangerous but you omitted to mention the crippling sanctions the US has imposed on Iran's major source of income and the fact that after the Iran-backed Kata’ib Hezbollah group fired rockets at a military base in Kirkuk, killing a US contractor and wounding several US and Iraqi troops, the Pentagon responded by launching airstrikes against five militia bases in Iraq and Syria, killing at least two dozen and wounding 50. It was after that the US Embassy was attacked.
I hope and pray that both sides can now let this drop. The world has enough problems without another senseless war. We will ever learn?
Hashtag : Coexist
"Things had started becoming increasingly desperate at Loftus Road but QPR have been handed a massive lifeline and the place has absolutely erupted. it's carnage. It's bedlam. It's 1-1."
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It's all gone off in Iran / Iraq..... on 15:23 - Jan 8 with 3268 views
I’d say, now that the dust has settled, that Trump has played a blinder on this. He’s killed Iran’s No2 and the principle promoter of terrorist activity in the region, demonstrated to Iran that he will not hesitate to act when it’s necessary, his actions have not (yet) resulted in the loss of one American life and watched as Iran carried out an ineffective, faux response. He has put them firmly in their place after being verbally taunted and by the use of missile strikes by proxies, for years.
He’s far more measured and effective than most give him credit for...despite some of the nonsense he spouts.
Puts tin hat on.....
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It's all gone off in Iran / Iraq..... on 16:15 - Jan 8 with 2068 views
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