Wednesday, January 08, 2020

Trump Gets Praise For Passing "The Gravest Test Of His Presidency" (CNN); After Talking Tough, The Cowardly Trump Backs Down (But Only After Killing Seven People); Democrats Are "Stunned" By A War Crime They Encouraged

Joan Summers, Jezebel, January 8, 2020:
This morning, Trump delivered an address in which he claimed Iran is "standing down" after last night's missile strike. ... In covering this statement, CNN led with this sentence: "President Donald Trump, facing the gravest test of his presidency, signaled a de-escalation of tensions with Iran."

See what's happening here? Instead of framing it for what it is, the warmongering of a power-mad pig with his sweaty hands firmly gripped around the launch codes, this is a "test." A test of what, though? By this logic, certainly a test of the U.S.'s ability to beat the world into submission around it. Or of our military's "strength," which plays into the first point. ... [T]his harkening to Trump's "test," whether intentionally or not, falls completely in line with what happened the last time the aspiring fascists in the U.S. government launched the country into an endless war, predicated on lies and war crimes and corporate greed.
Of course, it's intentional. One of CNN's core missions is to unquestioningly support US imperialism and dutifully disseminate the necessary propaganda. Its essential mandate is far larger and more important than any president, who are mere placeholders.

That's why the only "experts" you will ever see booked on CNN (and MSNBC, Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS, etc.) are former military generals, rabidly pro-war politicians, blood-thirsty think-tank members, and manufacturers of weapons?

Zachary B. Wolf and Veronica Stracqualursi, CNN, January 8, 2020:

When the US government killing of top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani was first announced, officials from the Pentagon up to President Donald Trump were careful to make clear the strike was meant to head off an imminent attack on Americans. ...

Since those first public announcements about the strike, officials have refused to provide evidence of an imminent attack and instead have argued that Soleimani's previous actions meant he would continue to act the same way and that eliminating him was part of a larger strategy.
On January 2, the Pentagon says the assassination was to deter "future Iranian attack plans".

On January 3, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo mentions "imminent threats". Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley says an attack was "absolutely" imminent, but can't say if it was days or weeks away.

On January 5, Pompeo is no longer talking about a specific threat, adding that any time frame (imminent?) is irrelevant.

On January 6, The US knew what Soleimani would do in the future, because of his past. Milley: "Did [the intelligence] exactly say who, what, when, where? No." Milley then immediately contradicts himself, saying he knows "who" (US military forces), "what" (significant combat operations), "when" (imminent), and "where" (in the region).

On January 7, Trump says the attack was an act of retaliation. Also that day, Defense Secretary Mark Esper tells reporters that Soleimani's time was due.




Stephen A. Crockett Jr., The Root, January 8, 2020:
Starting almost 30 minutes late for his press conference, President Trump—surrounded by a bevy of white men (literally everyone behind him made up the evolution of white men) ... soften[ed] his tone against Iran, which was vastly different than the Twitter tone he had a few days ago.

The president finally addressed Iran's Tuesday night attacks on Iraqi bases that housed U.S. soldiers on Wednesday morning ...

When the president finally spoke, he did three moves that I used to do when asked in elementary school why I didn't have a girlfriend: lie, deflect, and then stand down but kick it like I'm not standing down.

From the president's perspective, it looked like this: This is all Obama's fault (lie). This wouldn't be an issue if Obama would have handled it (deflect) and, We've got some big guns but be thankful that I believe in peace...Oh, and Obama.

The president completely bitched out. In fact, before the president stepped to the podium, Managing Editor Genetta Adams called it ...

"He's going to pussy out like he did with [Speaker of the House] Nancy Pelosi and the [government] shutdown. He's really a chicken when someone punches back."




Albert Burneko, The Outline, January 6, 2020:
The popular media narrative about the Iraq War holds, in its broad strokes, that the war was a near-universally popular idea at its outset even among otherwise reasonable and not ideologically pro-war people, who supported it based on what later turned out to be misinformation, from the tragic results of which everybody learned valuable lessons. It isn't true, though the broad class of centrist media types who beat the drum for that war back in 2002 — which is to say, nearly all of them — would like you to believe it is, both to exonerate their cheerleading for that war and to prop up their flattering (and phony) self-presentation as cool, level-headed skeptics who merely pass along facts about foreign affairs and public will, rather than enthusiastically parroting lies about the former for the express purpose of shaping the latter. ...

Which, all in all, makes it pretty fucking incredible to see, in 2020, none other than former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer and senior advisor Karl Rove, two of the most brazenly dishonest and thoroughly discredited mouthpieces for that disastrous war effort, appearing on TV news to offer authoritative analysis and justification for the country's latest doomed and ruinous misadventure in slaughtering people in the Middle East — in this case, the assassination of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps general Qasem Soleimani, reportedly carried out last week via an unmanned drone airstrike against his convoy of vehicles outside Baghdad International Airport in Iraq. To see performatively evenhanded NPR turn for sober expert commentary to the executive of a company that sells hardware to the military. To hear the addled, flamboyantly dishonest president and his hilariously discredited goons justify their act of aggression by hinting vaguely about having thwarted plans to kill Americans, and to see the New York Times pass these claims along with only the mildest of challenges. To see a discredited Iraq War cheerleader granted space in Friday morning's Times to predict, yet again, that yet another act of American imperial violence in the Middle East will yield no adverse consequences. To hear establishment Democratic leaders, including some of those vying for the party’s presidential nomination, once more raising toothless procedural qualms about whose signatures must be sought before the United States may project its mechanized death-dealing might 6,000 miles across the surface of the Earth to single out and kill whichever faraway people it deems unworthy of life, while simultaneously signalling broad agreement with both the broader concept and the specific choice of target. To read that thousands of American troops will be deployed to the region, but to be told by the same class of Knowers as before that this is at most a limited and well-defined engagement and not the red dawn of yet another hopeless, endless, pointless mass bloodletting.

Do you feel like you're going fucking crazy? Like everybody knows exactly what is happening right now but everybody is finding reasons to pretend it's something else? Like it suddenly seems alarmingly necessary to point out that wars are bad and that it's bad to start wars if you have the option of not starting wars? This is what it was like in 2002 [or 1990]! ... Only it's worse this time, because this time it has already happened, and already happened again, and I already know how it goes, and so do the people making it happen all over again but bigger and somehow more catastrophically than before.



Gareth Porter, Anti-War.com, July 9, 2019:
One of the many myths that have been used to justify the push for war with Iran led by National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is that Tehran is responsible for the killing of more than 600 U.S. troops during the Iraq War.

Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook, whose job is to round up international support for the Trump administration's campaign of "maximum pressure" on Iran, presented the charge at a State Department press briefing on April 2. "I can announce today, based on declassified U.S. military reports," Hook said, "that Iran is responsible for the deaths of 608 American service members. This accounts for 17 percent of all deaths of U.S. personnel in Iraq from 2003 to 2011."

Navy Commander Sean Robertson followed up with an email to media outlets pushing that same line. When this writer asked Robertson for further clarification of the origins of that figure, however, he acknowledged that the Pentagon doesn't have any study, documentation, or data to provide journalists that would support such a figure.

In fact, the myth that Tehran is responsible for killing over 600 U.S. troops in the Iraq War is merely a new variant of a propaganda line that former Vice President Dick Cheney used to attempt to justify a war against Iran more than a decade ago. Reviewing the history of that earlier effort is necessary to understand why the new myth is a palpable lie. ...

When officials of the Trump administration claim that Iran is responsible for U.S. deaths in Iraq, they are following Dick Cheney's playbook. As the Bolton-Pompeo team tries to steer the U.S. toward attacking Iran, it is important to draw that parallel to Cheney's strategy, and understand the history behind this push for war.



Paul Street, CounterPunch, January 6, 2020:
Top Democrats are "stunned" that Trump impulsively ordered the killing of "the commanding general of a sovereign government" (New York Times) – Iran's Maj. Gen. Qassim Soliemani – on the sovereign territory of Iraq without the permission of Iraq's government. The imperial assassination of Soliemani is a criminal act of war guaranteed to provoke a reaction that could produce a regional war involving U.S. forces in the Middle East. ...

But there's no basis for establishment shock and surprise. Trump is an amoral militarist and faux-isolationist who opened his presidency by going to the CIA's headquarters to complain that the United States had gone too long without "winning wars" and to say that the U.S. might have another chance to invade Iraq and "get the oil." ...

At the same time, Democrats and their media allies have little moral ground to stand on when it comes to criticizing Trump's action. From the beginning of Trump's anti-Iran and Teheran-provoking- and punishing presidency (replete with previous war-scares and a brutal sanctions regime imposed after Trump pulled out of Obama's nuclear deal with Iran) and before, Democrats and the "liberal" media have fully participated in advancing the ludicrous imperial notion that Iran is a uniquely evil, dangerous, belligerent, destabilizing, and terrorist actor in the Middle East – the region's top malign aggressor.

It's an absurd narrative. The most truly aggressive, destructive, and malevolent state actor in the Middle East beyond the racist occupation and apartheid state of Israel (a U.S. ally and the region's preeminent military power) and Superpower itself (the U.S. has murdered well more than a million Iraqis since 1990 and is the sponsor of Saudi Arabia and Israel) – is the U.S.-backed Saudi kingdom. ...

The main problem with Trump's action as depicted in much of the "liberal" media isn't that it was an imperial war crime. It's that it was ordered by the wrong president, an irresponsible narcissist who lacks the proper imperial credentials and credentials for carrying out such a deadly, provocative, and sensitive transgression. The message is clear: it would have been fine for Obama to kill Soliemani. It would be okay for Joe Biden or former U.S. Army intelligence officer Pete Butiggieg to commit the crime.

It is reflexively taken for doctrinal granted by "liberal" Democrats no less than Republicans that the United States possesses the right to maintain a massive and lethal military and political presence in and around the oil-rich Middle East. It's okay because, as the liberal imperialist Bill Clinton's liberal imperialist Secretary of State Madeline Albright once said, "we [the United States] are good."

Remember Albright? She's the former Madame Secretary who worries about fascism and who once told CBS News that the murder of half a million Iraqi children by U.S. economic sanctions was a "price worth paying" for the advance of Washington's inherently noble foreign policy goals.


David Roth, being asked about Trump being "somewhat of a muse", -30-, January 2018:
I grew up in New Jersey and saw the dude in the tabloids all through my youth, showing his ass and posturing and posing and generally fucking every possible thing up as badly as possible. It never occurred to me that he could be anything but the joke that he always was to people from around here—this sad horny dipshit who kept duffing shit and had a lot of publicists working for him, but who was dumb enough that he wound up tanking Atlantic City's economy, more or less by himself, forever. Not many people can crush a whole city's economy via sheer bluff-o jagoffery and then just jog on like it didn't happen.

Which is to say that I really don't like the dude, but there is something in the infected nightmare he is that… I don't really think "inspires" is the right word here. But given my fixation on a certain set of toxic national neuroses, and given how fulsomely Trump himself performs them every day, he just lines up perfectly as a lodestar for me. Trump is every unchecked and unexamined national delusion about Success come to life, as well as a whole bunch of less-explicit but equally toxic ones about race and power and gender relations, and some active if more latent ones about authoritarianism and its various attendant cruelties. It's a rare thing to say that someone is truly Everything You Hate, but, man, I am struggling to come up with a phrase that's more accurate here.

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