I think Neil Diamond came closer.
There is no doubt this is casus belli. Which is of course not in the Iranian regime’s best interest.
The only appropriate response by Iran would be to assassinate a US General in Iraq. Followed by the inevitable accusations of terrorism by the US.
This imminent threat justification is just WMDs all over again.
North Korea’s notebook on why they need nuclear weapons just keeps getting longer and longer.
I wouldn’t be so sure. They must retaliate, because that is the logic of these things. But they will want to avoid an escalation, as a military exchange of blows would be deadly for many in the regime. And if Trump personally gave the order to fire a Hellfire from a Reaper they will want to make the retaliation personal. I would worry if I was Ivanka, Donald Jr. or Eric. Not so much if I was Melania. And there is a lot of mischief they can do by proxy: all the militias Iran controls in Lebanon, Jemen, Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Libya… etc. etc.
I hope it does not spiral out of control.
I hope you stay safe.
Can’t you fake some illness/family situation and get the fuck out of dodge? Preferably before the explosions?
To assume that there’s nobody in the chain of command who would have the competence or know-how of Soleimani is probably a miscalculation. They’d lack the experience at the helm for sure, but it’s not as a successor would be completely in the dark about how to run the kinds of operations that Soleimani and his #2 did. It’s not some rag-tag group of radicals running around from hillside to hillside and cave to cave; it’s an organized militia that’s funded and otherwise supported by a regional nation-state power.
I find it hard to believe that this blow is as crippling as the news reports are making it out to be. I’m sure it will shake things up in the near term, but over time, they will regroup and do what they’ve been doing for decades.
I hope you stay safe.
Can’t you fake some illness/family situation and get the fuck out of dodge? Preferably before the explosions?
Have you not seen the tweets Trump sent out several years ago where he predicted that Obama would try to start a war with Iran to help with his re-election?
I think Trump views war as a boon to his campaign.
If Soleimani was a commander of any caliber at all, he’d have a well-trained and well-briefed chain of command capable of executing the plan. One would expect that after heading an international terror organization for 20 years, losing staff fairly frequently, he’s gotten fairly good at that.
Check out this WaPo article showing some insight into his thought process. Here is part of a text message from Soleimani to David Petraeus in 2008:
This is a man who thinks about succession quite a bit, and has a deep bench of talent to replace him.
Perhaps you hadn’t read the new rules for GD and P&E, Ravenman, but betting is now specifically disallowed.
I’m sure that Stephen Miller is fuckin’ ecstatic.
Pence is on the case, lying about [DEL]WMDs in Iraq[/DEL] Suleimani helping “10 of the 12” 9/11 hijackers. This is just straight up gaslighting – first, there were 19 hijackers, second Iran would have no interest in helping Sunni terrorists. More debunking here:
Pay walled, for those who don’t subscribe or know how to clear cookies. Here’s a good quote:
Much more in the article. Pence is lying his ass off here, in a much more obvious way than Cheney did about the WMDs and Iraq’s connection to 9/11 (always careful to never state anything definitively). So, anyone willing to defend his lies and gaslighting on this very serious subject?
And WWI was viewed highly skeptically in the US in the interwar period, often as a case of the US having been maneuvered by the British into a war that was not its concern and with no sharply defined good and bad guys after all. The European view of the US view of WWI is often ‘why would the US public care that much about a war that cost the US such a small fraction in lives as it cost us? (and BTW you Americans claim a much larger role in that war than is justified)’. But in this tangent we’re discussing the US view, the pop history theme ‘the US was so successful in wars especially up to the big one, WWII, but can’t get it right ever since’.
But actually there was a mixed record of achieving ‘permanent’ victory that was ‘worth it’ in US wars prior to WWII, and WWI is not the only example. WWII, or the feeling about it, here at the end of the era of ‘Greatest Generation’ veneration in the US, is perhaps more the exception than the rule in US case. And considering all other countries and wars the % of ‘victory that was worth it’ is not high, as every ‘victory that was worth it’ meant a defeat for somebody else, even given the odd cases of wars which tend to be viewed as successes on both sides (like the War of 1812 generally viewed favorable in the US, while Canadians have a fantasy that their country actually existed then and ‘won the War of 1812’ :); to Brits, who the US actually fought in that war, it’s very minor among all their many wars). ‘War is waste’ as Sherman said so you’d expect with objective rationality most wars to eventually be viewed as not worth it taking the average of both sides’ view.
The US wanted to end up with a piece of what is now Canada, and obviously failed.
To assume anything as a certainty in such a case would be incorrect. However the example was given before of the ‘assassination’ of Yamato in April 1943 (I’ll leave any difference in supposed legality between that case and this one to the internet legal experts). The US decision makers explicitly considered not only the feasibility of that attack but whether Yamamoto might be succeeded by a more or less capable person, and were ready to forego the opportunity if it was likely to be a more capable person. Which though is hard to judge even in full hindsight. Yamamoto’s successors as CinC Combined Fleet were relative non-entities in history, Koga killed in an accidental plane crash in early 1944 then Toyoda who oversaw the disastrous battles of Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf. But lots of other factors were piling up against the IJN in that period besides who happened to be CinC Combined Fleet. There’s no way to know if Yamamoto’s performance in the later phase of the war would have superior to those two men in anything like proportion to how much bigger his fame is now, or what difference it would have made.
But US intel might indeed have a particular idea if the IRGC really has a ‘deep bench’, rather than just assuming that, as some posts seem to. I would hope it’s not publicly revealed for many years what US intel (probably significantly aided by allies) knows or think they know about the IRGC, which would point to how they know it. Nobody has to agree with an action like this. But I tend naturally not to take a strong view on this of kind of thing in the moment. There’s a lot I don’t know, and no way to conduct an effective war/near-war foreign policy if the public, and therefore the adversary, has all the information US decision makers do.
The ‘US’ having previously taken a piece of ‘Canada’ from the French in the Seven Years War. Except the US didn’t exist then as a political entity. That was the British. Just like Canada did not exist as a political entity in 1812. The Seven Years War (French and Indian War) was between Britain and France in North America, not the the US or US/Canada v France. The War of 1812 was US v Britain, not US v Canada or Canada and Britain. Every country has its silly mythology, even the oh so rational and even tempered Canadians, the example being their fantasy about ‘Canada’ fighting in the War of 1812.
It’s already begun. My MAGA Facebook friend, who is our window into the right-wing meme machine, has already posted a picture of a grinning Trump with the caption “I just notified Iran that Obama is no longer in charge.”
Since we’re on an 1812 tangent, I love how completely unheroic the Fort McHenry chapter of the Battle of Baltimore is. The British Navy shelled the defenders until, they got bored and went home. The Star Spangled Banner is about people cowering until the shelling stopped (and about taking revenge on re-enslaved people), super heroic guys. The Battle of Baltimore is the war of 1812 in a nutshell. The British eventually get bored, and decide to call it a day, the US declares victory.
Have you been asleep since 2003?
This is plausible. In a move that hasn’t been reported much in Western media the Foreign Minister of Qatar (a country that hosts a huge US airbase but also maintains a relationship with Iran) was quickly dispatched to Tehran within hours of the killing with a message from Washington.
A lot of things are plausible to outside speculators and armchair geo-political wonks. The quoted rumor that suggests the murder was an accident because the intended target was some lower level operative is something circulating within Iran as well. Iranians don’t wish to accept that the US would target such an important and popular Iranian figure.
This may or may not be true. We won’t know until more information is released. Until then, every dignitary in the M.E. is on alert and involved in back channel communication on behalf of one party or another. This is about damage control for everyone in the region and outside the region to keep it from escalating out of control.