Wagging
Trump’s cunning plan to avoid impeachment? Or just the normal reckless aggression and urge to smash everything not-self?
George Packer asks some questions:
But the main question about the strike isn’t moral or even legal—it’s strategic. Soleimani was a supremely powerful leader of a state apparatus, with his own cult of personality, but he was not a terror kingpin. His death doesn’t decapitate anything. He had the blood of tens of thousands of people—overwhelmingly fellow Muslims—on his hands, but he was only the agent of a government policy that preceded him and will continue without him. His deeds are beside the point; so is the display of American resolve. The only reason to kill Soleimani is to enter a new war that the United States can win.
What would that war look like? How will Iran fight it? How will the U.S. respond? What credible allies will we have, after Trump’s trashing of the nuclear deal thoroughly alienated Europe? Who will believe any intelligence about Iran’s actions and intentions from an administration that can’t function without telling lies? How will American officials deliberate when Trump has gotten rid of his experts and turned his government into a tool of personal power? What is the point of having a Congress if it has no say about a new American war?
And many more questions.
There’s no sign that anyone in power, least of all the president, has even asked these questions, let alone knows how to answer them. No one seems to have thought past the action itself. The initial statements from the administration have been alarmingly ludicrous. “This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans,” the Defense Department announced afterward. “The world is a much safer place today,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo intoned, sounding like the Minister of Truth. “I can assure you that Americans in the region are much safer.”
Mike Pompeo can’t assure me it’s January 3, because he’s Mike Pompeo. There’s a cost to having an administration packed with criminals and incompetents.
The outlook is grim.
I assume that the last sentence of his first paragraph should read “a new war that the United States can‘t win. Because all this does is send us further down the rabbit hole of the Middle East with no obvious way out.
Admittedly Trump inherited a near-impossible situation, but he’s managed to make it much worse.
WTF is the US doing, using its government to assassinate officials of other nations?
My objection to this monstrous and immoral practice is not based on party; I know that many administrations have engaged in such extrajudicial murder. We are wedded to violence, and we shall reap its consequences. It’s too bad that the present chief executive is an incompetent fool.
(I just posted this on Facebook, but it seems apropos here as well.)
If historians are still around to write the history of the post-WWII United States, surely one theme will be how Congress has abdicated its duty to declare war. Every President (with the possible exception of Ford; I honestly don’t remember and don’t feel like googling) has authorized a military strike on foreign soil; most have conducted full-fledged wars and overthrown governments, and the best Congress can do is pass a weak, post-facto law informing the president that you’ve got to justify yourself or else…! (Or else we’ll continue to finance your wars anyway; after all, politics ends at the border, right?)
I’m not arguing that forcing Congress to declare war before we actually conduct one will ensure that we only fight just wars; anyone who paid attention in history class knows that’s not true. But at least the process of declaring wars forces us to pay attention and to enunciate the reasons and the goals of the war, and the wars we’ve declared have all been rather short, with a well-defined end.
@What a Maroon
Also too lazy to google, but do any countries formally declare war these days, as they did in WWII?
Unfortunately, the UK is fast approaching its actual exit from the EU, and therefore is in prime position to be bullied into accompanying USA as a condition for getting a
favourable trade dealany trade deal at all. Which will probably still end up being exploitative. This is especially likely with the odious conservatives in power.And I worry that Australia will also join in. We have our own conservative shitheads in power at the moment, and they have a fine tradition of joining USA in its military excursionism in return for… some pathetically patronising pats on the back. Ever since John Howard, our conservative PMs have been willing lapdogs to USA.
Here’s a good video from Caspian Report on the possible development of war with Iran: https://youtu.be/AccjEv2eVe0
He’ll likely reissue it in light of current events, but that video remains a good primer.