This Iranian Situation Will Take Intelligence And Critical Thought

None of which will come from our idiot “elite”.

Rose MacGowan – who, I’m told, is something of a movie star – twote:

Ms. McGowan – I suggest going to Teheran to work this out personally.

Wearing the outfit in your Twitter profile photo.

Get back to us. If you can.

The assassination of Soleimani does present some gnarly questions: he was a fair target under current international agreements about terrorism – but one could raise questions about whether it was a great idea. Also whether it was an act of war.

On the other hand, we’re treated to the spectacle of watching politicians, deep-staters, media drones and celebs who batted not an eyelash over Obama’s constant, intense campaign of drone, air and special ops “hits”, complaining about Orange LIterally Hitler Man doing it to a target that actually matters, but up to whom The LIghtworker sucked…

…and having to choose, in public, during an election year, with whom to side in public.

Troublling?

Brilliant?

Why choose? It’s both.

93 thoughts on “This Iranian Situation Will Take Intelligence And Critical Thought

  1. Obama clearly understood that there would be no lasting peace in the Middle East unless the US and Iran reached and kept a nuclear containment deal then built up a more comprehensive working relationship off that starting point.
    Well, Obama was a lunatic, then, wasn’t he?

  2. Trump likes to be seen to be ‘winning’, which is why he took badly to the attacks on the US embassy in Baghdad but his notion of victory is very short-term. The US has no obvious end game for the moment.

    There is a fundamental question that every Western government needs to ask before embarking on actions such as the assassination of Soleimani — what will happen tomorrow? Because if the answer is a net increase in tension and violence, then the action is simply counter productive.

    When you’re carrying a hammer, there’s a temptation to see every problem as a nail. It’s a temptation that should be resisted. Some believe that Trump is reckless enough to start a serious war as an election tactic. I’m more worried that he’s also foolish enough to start one by mistake.

  3. I do not believe the Iranians have a lot of ability to retaliate. As time passes, we’ll see what they can do. I’ve read breathless reports that the Iranians may attack US warships. That hardly seems likely. The Iranians are holding a poor hand compared to the US.
    But as time passes, retaliation loses its effectiveness. My gut feeling is that they are more talk than action. Anything that they do to hurt us will hurt them more.

  4. Why the media & it’s phalanx of “ex CIA analysts” can’t be trusted:
    “So, yes it’s good that [Soleimani’s] gone, but it’s come at an extraordinarily high price,” Morell said. “And that’s why the Bush administration and the Obama administration chose not to do something like this.”
    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/qassem-soleimani-iran-general-killed-dead-americans-as-result-former-acting-cia-director-michael-morell/

    So far the price has been $0. I would make a better “Deputy CIA Director” than this jack ass.

  5. ^^ Problem: Trump says US intelligence should be believed and acted upon, unless he doesn’t like it (in which case it’s Fake News). How’s

  6. Why do people keep looking at politicians’ words as though they matter? I don’t pay any more attention to Trump’s sales pitches than I did to Obama’s sales pitches. It’s just nattering and pushing a narrative. If only libs had been as skeptical about Obama’s sales’ pitches as they are of Trump’s, the country would be better off.
    For example, when Obama got on the topic of global warming, they should have said to themselves “this guy doesn’t know anything about the climate, or the history of science. He has a BA from a third-string university that he managed to parlay into a law degree from Harvard. God help us if he thinks that he knows enough about economics and climate science to dictate the details of federal energy policy.”

  7. This was an extraordinary miscalculation by the Iranian Supreme Leader.

    “That guy has tweeted that we see Iran responsible for the events in Baghdad & we will respond to Iran.
    1st: You can’t do anything.
    2nd: If you were logical —which you’re not— you’d see that your crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan… have made nations hate you.” ~ Khamenei.ir @khamenei_ir

  8. Em, Iran’s “miscalculation” was driven by experience with three squishy presidents and desperation. Iran is fast running out of money, it’s just outside of hyperinflation due to the US economic pressure, and there’s lots of discontent with their rule at home, in Lebanon, and Iraq.

    So Iran wants regime change here. They know SloJoe or any of the other Demonrats running for president will go back to the old Obama policies that shoveled them pallets of money, so they order up a campaign meant to humiliate Trump from a rather arrogant Soleimani, who thinks Trump is just another US president beholden to the Europeans and his Foggy Bottom advisers. (Although why they’d think Trump was typical after his attacks on the Europeans and the testimony of DoS employees during the impeachment hearings is beyond me.) US intelligence picks up on that plan for a steady stream of escalating attacks that seem calculated to turn the US public against Trump in an election year, masterminded by one person, the death of whom would seriously disrupt those attacks.

    Trump already has a fairly firm red line as far as killing Americans. Did the Iranians really expect their agents wouldn’t become targets if they were threatening Americans, and, oh yeah, Trump’s image and reelection? Have they not seen how the man reacts to those who just criticize him, much less how he treats those who he views as a threat to him socially? If they didn’t see this coming, they were d*mn dumb.

    (Yes, I’m very cynical when it comes to these attacks. Why do you ask? That cynicism doesn’t negate the fact that I think taking out Soliemani was a good idea, even if I have my doubts the motives were entirely of the purest nature.)

  9. @MP. Any attack won’t come directly from Iran on any US asset. That would completely free Trump to respond directly on Iran, and they know it. Their economy contracted by 9.5% in 2019 due to US sanctions, and 2020 is projected to be worse. Their president, Rohani, has called this the biggest economic challenge since the revolution in ’79. So regime is shaky enough as it is, and it wouldn’t take much of an attack to bring things crashing down there. Which is why I mentioned refineries. Iran can’t import much machinery, so taking out their refineries would restrict their military operations, tank the remaining economy, and probably couldn’t be repaired in even the medium term.

    From what we’ve seen of Trump’s behavior, openly attacking Americans and taking American lives will bring out the big guns, and Iran can’t afford anything like that. So Iran will need “plausible deniability” at the least. That implies that Iranian proxies (rebels, terrorists, etc) will be the ones to deliver the retaliation.

    Besides, the mullahs really would like to see Trump gone and random Demonrat in, so retaliation would be good for them. The problem for them is that Trump got rid of their #1 guy in charge of doing that sort of thing so it will take a while for them to recover.

    ps. I loved the symbolism of Trump’s threat to hit 52 Iranian targets, one for each US hostage in ’79, if Iran tried anything. If Iran does nothing, the mullahs are weakened, and if Iran does something, the 52 targets will likely be enough to push the Iranian economy over the edge and bring down the mullahs at last — Soleimani was their chief muscle man as far as putting down the Iranian protesters and he’s having difficulties giving orders at this time.

  10. ^^ Trump’s priority is doing things differently from Obama, not doing what is right.

    This was not a strategic decision. It did, however, advance Netanyahu’s stated goals of aggression against Iran. It advanced Saudi Arabia’s longstanding goal of attacking Iran.

    In conservative foreign policy circles, escalation against Iran is seen as some sort of noble goal, despite the fact that containment has worked better. We know Cheney wanted to go to war against Iraq before 9/11. The question now is will there be a pivotal event––and who benefits?

  11. Iranians are Persians, dreaming of lost glory of world domination.

    And that was before they became fundamentalist Muslims, committed to killing everyone in the world that won’t convert to their religion.

    Americans can tolerate a lot of disrespect and we do. Idiots jumping around shooting rifles in the air yelling “Death to America” while burning our flag is just the way those savages act. Nobody cares. But attack our people on our soil, and that’s entirely different.

    Notice how none of the major networks are not releasing poll results showing 80% of the American people are pissed that Trump killed the general whose troops attacked the embassy? The media polls everything he does and if the results are against him, they blast it nonstop. Why not this time?

    Because we’re not pissed at him. Even people who reflexively despise him are saying to themselves, “Yeah, that guy had it coming.”

    Here’s a wild thought – what if peace in the Middle East was . . . not our problem? What if we packed up our troops and came home, leaving them to sort out their own problems? Kurds, Jews, Arabs, Persians, Negros, Muslims, it’s your land, you figure it out.

  12. Here’s a wild thought – what if peace in the Middle East was . . . not our problem? […]

    I’ll second that, JD. As a parting gift, can we send back some, many, or all of those m-effers who don’t seem to like us?

  13. Trump found an interesting way to withdraw US troops from Iraq and essentially hand over the country to Iran. Can’t wait to see how all those conservatives who once attacked Obama for pulling troops out of Iraq react to this.

    Whether Trump wants it when forced by Iran and Iraq is another question.

  14. Liberals like to claim our problems in the Middle East are immoral, blood for oil. Okay, let’s say that’s true. How would that affect our strategy today?

    During the 1850’s Gold Rush, it was cheaper to load dirty laundry on ships in San Francisco and sent it to Hawaii to be laundered and returned, than to have it laundered at home.

    In the days when it was cheaper to pump oil out of the ground in the Middle East and ship it on tankers to America than it was to pump it here, we needed peace in the Middle East so we installed puppet regimes like the Shah of Iran and the House of Saud. Live like sultans, crush dissidents, we don’t care, just keep the oil flowing.

    That worked until the sultans figured out they could put the squeeze on us by cutting production and threatening embargo. 1973 was a big wake-up call but going to war for oil wasn’t feasible, we were already at war in Vietnam and nobody wanted another. We limped along at 55 mph wearing sweaters and driving Honda Civics, trying to keep the lid on the Middle East so we could continue to beg for oil.

    Until fracking came along. We no longer need Middle Eastern oil. Therefore, we don’t care if those countries are peaceful. Therefore, we can pull out and leave them to their ancient hatreds.

    That’s what happens if the US involvement in the Middle East is solely blood for oil. But it’s not.

  15. Emery thinks that Trump has done the impossible — make allies of Israel and the Saudis.
    For at least a half century, the left has exaggerated the strength of our enemies and underestimated the strength of the US. The US is republic with the greatest wealth and the greatest military power the world has ever seen. Iran struggles to even become a regional power. We have nothing to fear from them, if they go completely crazy and attempt to close the straights of Hormuz that is good for us and bad for them.

  16. Liberals second big motive for involvement in the Middle East occurs because they’re still carrying the White Man’s Burden. It was first articulated in Great Britain to justify colonizing the world. Modern Liberals see it as America’s obligation to bring enlightened civilization (liberal democracy) to the savages, to pull down the tyrants, to redistribute the land, to lift up the downtrodden.

    People like Susan Rice, Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton (the Three Harpies) pushed Obama into sending US troops to places like Libya, Syria, Somalia, Chad . . . all for moral reasons. But the morality of the White Man’s Burden arises from religion; specifically, from British Protestant Christianity. This strain gave rise to Calvanism, to Methodism, to William Booth who founded the Salvation Army and William Wilberforce, who stopped the slave trade in England, and the Mennonite and Quaker abolitionists that pushed to stop the American slave trade.

    Liberals would be aghast at the notion they were imposing their religious values on other people, that we were interfering in the internal affairs of their countries, that we were committing cultural genocide. But we were. And still are.

  17. The third reason Liberals need to meddle in the Middle East is guilt.

    The Middle East was divided up to give Jews a national home by Western politicians drawing lines on the map (the Balfour Declaration 1917). Hey, we conquered it, we are enlightened, we’ll divvy it up so the wogs can have their own space, hey, what? Splendid, old chap. Didn’t really work, Jews weren’t inspired to leave Europe to live in a desert.

    Kristallnacht occurred in 1938, six weeks after the Munich Agreement was signed. Democrat FDR was president. He did nothing as Nazis rounded up Jews for death camps until Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. Six million Jews died. Why didn’t America intervene sooner?

    After the war, Great Britain owned Palestine. They let it go so Jews could establish the nation of Israel in 1948. Arabs attacked, lost, attacked again in 1967, lost, again in 1973, lost, and have been fighting about it ever since.

    Liberals feel guilty that they didn’t intervene earlier to save Jews in World War II and didn’t help the fledgling nation get its feet on the ground. But they also feel guilty that Arabs got pushed off their land by British politicians drawing lines on maps. And they feel guilty that Jews and Arabs have such burning faith in their own religions to be willing to die for them, while Americans sit around fat, dumb and happy driving big cars and watching All Star Wrestling.

    So we must intervene again, re-draw the lines, right old wrongs. Make the victor give back captured lands in The Occupied Territories and the Golan Heights. Change Israel’s immigration policy. Decide where the American embassy can sit.

  18. Oil. Morals. Guilt. All reasons Liberals use to justify international busy-bodyism.

    Our nation was founded on principles of “peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations – entangling alliances with none.” We need to return to our principles. Let other nations solve their own problems, in their own way, so long as they don’t threaten our nation.

    Liberals call this isolationist. Anti-Semitic. Naive, head-in-the-sand, ignorance. They are mistaken. Minding our own business is the first obligation of a truly enlightened civilization.

    President Trump should tell the world that we are no longer willing to play “Let’s You and Him Fight.” The World’s Policeman is taking a vacation.

  19. Trump reminds me of the meth-head who starts “improving” every major appliance in the house by taking it apart and somehow never getting it back together.

  20. JD wrote: “Minding our own business is the first obligation of a truly enlightened civilization”

    Trump ran on ending the Mideast wars. He also said he would “bomb the sh*t” out of ISIS and talked about taking Iraqi oil. He didn’t run as an isolationist or an interventionist; he ran as both, and still does.

    Walking out the front door and jumping out a window are both ways to leave a building.

  21. Lots of people blame the evils of the ME on the Balfour declaration & other actions taken by the the victors of WWI. Usually it is said that the people who created the new nations didn’t know what they were doing.
    But they had no choice. The Ottoman Empire had crashed and burned. There was no model of free & independent nations in the ME, for all of recorded history its ethnic enclaves were dominated by regional powers. The alternative to the current hodge podge of nations is domination by the Syrians, the Iranians, or the Egyptians.

  22. Emery on January 5, 2020 at 11:39 am said:
    Trump reminds me of the meth-head who starts “improving” every major appliance in the house by taking it apart and somehow never getting it back together.

    As opposed to Bush or Obama? Trump has intervened in the ME far less than either. You really have no reasoning process other than “Orange Man Bad.”

  23. “Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective. So the only way he figures that he’s going to get reelected and is sure as you’re sitting there is to start a war with Iran.” – Donald Trump 2011 (re: Obama)

    As ever, projecting.

  24. You can tell that you are deep into TDS when Trump can do no right — when he intervenes in the ME, he is getting us involved in foreign wars, and he was elected to oppose foreign wars. But if he does not intervene in the ME, then he is foolishly ignoring the advice of wiser heads & reversing decades of US foreign policy decisions.

  25. America is good at hitting targets. Good at winning wars. But not so good at dealing with the aftermath. Not even at imagining what the aftermath might be.

    Trump, who can’t think two moves ahead, didn’t understand that betraying the Syrian Kurds jeopardized America’s presence in Iraq. But Iran understood. Belatedly, Trump tried to recover by taking out Soleimani. But that just compounded the original mistake.

    Iran will bide its time. Wait for the best moment to strike. The best moment to remove American troops from Iraq. Just as Reagan’s troops were removed from Lebanon.

    And neither Trump or Pompeo or the many others whose job it is to formulate and strategize America’s Middle East policy will understand just what happened.
    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/iranian-revenge-will-be-a-dish-best-served-cold/

    Actually, I would say that Iran won the 2003 Iraq invasion. They got rid of Saddam Hussein and delivered the country to the Shia majority without firing a shot. If they can force America out — Iran’s victory will be complete.

  26. “America is good at hitting targets. Good at winning wars. But not so good at dealing with the aftermath. Not even at imagining what the aftermath might be.”
    Except for World War One & World War Two

    “They got rid of Saddam Hussein and delivered the country to the Shia majority without firing a shot. If they can force America out — Iran’s victory will be complete.”
    Wily bastards! They TRICKED us into killing Soleiman! We played right into their hands!

  27. At times like this I’m just glad we have Jared Kushner in charge of the Middle East peace process.

  28. As opposed to Ben Rhodes? Or Valerie Jarrette? You don’t know how ridiculous you sound. Jarrette was Daly’s outreach person to the Chicago Black community. God only knows how she stayed out of jail.

  29. I see the Iranians have put an $80 million dollar bounty on Trump’s head. Lol, what a joke of a country. They are completely unserious about being a part of the world community.

  30. “I see the Iranians have put an $80 million dollar bounty on Trump’s head.”
    only $80M? Did they spend all the rest of the money that Obama paid them to participate in John Kerry’s masterfully crafted nuclear agreement?

  31. Supposedly the 80 million $ is one dollar per Iranian. So the bounty is purely a PR thing for domestic consumption.
    The goal of the US, if US leadership was good, would be to show the Iranians what the end of the end of the regime would look like, and then show that they were on this road and could not escape it.

  32. MP, JD et. al

    I hate to break up the wonderful conversation you think you’re having with D_K, but as per usual, you’re actually debating with people having the discussion elsewhere…this time, it’s something D_K stumbled upon while trolling Twitter.

    https://mobile.twitter.com/qjurecic/status/1075872776458854400

    If the reason D_K pops off with stuff apropos of nothing has not occurred to you fellas by now, there’s not much more I can do to help.

    D_K is a 1/4 wit. He doesn’t have anything of value to offer. Any insight he posts that seems witty or interesting in the least, is 100% guaranteed to be copied and pasted from somewhere else.

  33. When you control the most powerful armed forces in the history of the world, giving the capacity to surgically strike a target anywhere at short notice and with devastating precision, there is a huge temptation to see force as a solution to intractable problems. It takes wisdom, patience and restraint to resist that temptation and stick to the tedious grinding work of diplomacy. Has there ever been a President as seduced by the illusion of military power or as easy to bait asTrump?

    Temperamentally, Trump may very well be the least suitable President in US history. He is shallow, vain, impulsive and easily provoked. There is a theory that the Pentagon only included General Suleimani as an illustrative “Armageddon option” on a list of possible targets. His inclusion was purely intended to frame the other more “real world” options that the President was supposed to select from. However, the President isn’t restrained by the judgement and balance of his predecessors. So he picked the name at the top of the list to show everyone how tough he is. There were no policy criteria at work, simply vanity.

    For all of his scandals, pratfalls and missteps, thus far the world has been remarkably lucky with Trump. He hasn’t been tested by a full blown crisis. But even this run of good luck
    has been peppered with examples of his staggering idiocy, ranging from picking a fight with Canada (Canada, for Goodness sake!) and sucking up to North Korea.

    As events this past week have shown, this good fortune cannot last forever. So far, Trump’s mini-crises have basically been of his own making. What happens when he is suddenly blindsided by a real crisis?

  34. SwifteeP – yes, we’re aware of it. We know there’s no chance we’ll change his mind. Not enough mind to change.

    But he’s not the only person who reads the comments. For readers who rarely comment, maybe a thoughtful discussion and point-by-point refutation would reinforce the belief that they’re not alone, they’re not crazy, that the alternative to The Narrative actually does make sense. I write for them.

    And for me, of course. Writers write. It’s a compulsion, like a mental illness. If I weren’t writing for SITD, I’d be bothering someone else. I’m grateful to Mitch for providing me a space to do it.

  35. “Emery” wrote:
    ” Has there ever been a President as seduced by the illusion of military power or as easy to bait as Trump?”
    Well, let’s see. There was Bill Clinton, who violated international law by bombing civilian infrastructure in Serbia. This popularized the expression “wag the dog” because he was widely viewed as involving the US in an internal European matter to distract attention from his domestic problems.
    Then there was GW Bush, who invaded not one, but two countries. We still have troops in those countries (Iraq and Afghanistan) with no hint that they will ever be withdrawn.
    Then there was Obama, and Hillary Clinton, who overthrew Libyan president for life Moamar Khaddafi, and left that country a terrorist refuge.

  36. MP, you forgot Reagan bombing Khadaffi, which killed his infant daughter and a lot of civilians but not the man.

    Khadaffi, you may remember had an elite squad of female body guards…dude couldn’t been all that bad.

  37. Joe, Inhear what you’re saying. I just have to point out how big a lying douch nozzle D_K is.

  38. BTW. Doxxing D_K would be a mercy to the people who know him irl. No one could be as lying and conniving as he is online unless it was second nature, and carried over to his personal life.

    Who knows how many friends he has fucked over?

  39. I could’ve mentioned GHW Bush, too, for his leaving the mess of Saddam’s Iraq for the next four (so far) presidents to clean up.
    The Gulf War was started with the best of justifications: maintaining the post WW2 consensus that nations can’t go around gobbling up other nations. But the after-war scenario was poorly thought out.

  40. Regarding being seduced by military power, don’t forget Bill Clinton’s bombing of an aspirin factory in Sudan, or Obama bragging on how often he signed off on a LOT of drone attacks. He even joked about using drones on his daughters’ boyfriends.

    Yeah, but Trump is the big threat, because it’s OK for Obama to take out a terrorist leader who killed thousands, but it’s not OK for Trump to take out a terrorist leader who killed tens or hundreds of thousands. Or something like that.

    And now I’m reading that the “world is distancing themselves” from the death of this guy. We’ve come a long way from dancing in the streets when Yamamoto and Mussolini assumed room temperature, that’s for sure. What the **** is wrong with us that we cannot celebrate this? You would figure that Iran’s treatment of homosexuals and women alone would help western Europe celebrate, but no such luck.

  41. It seems Trump’s objective to get the US out of the Middle East is shared by Iran. If Iran is clever enough to keep a low profile in the face of provocation, Trump, urged on by Iraq and Syria, will carry out their policy for them.

    The whole post-9/11 fiasco reaches its absurd conclusion as the Saudi Royals laugh into their beer.

  42. Way back at the beginning of this thread (I think it was this thread), Emery said, “I’m not expert on the Middle East, so don’t pay attention to what I say.” My thought, “No problem. Done.”

    And yet, he’s still on here.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.