It starts out, to paraphrase, saying “O great ones, I hear ye and I tremble!” And then immediately follows that with, “Hey, y’all, I’ll going to be moving my shit around, tidying up, don’t mind me!”
If it weren’t for the beginning, I’d wonder if it wasn’t a letter written before the bombing that just took a while to arrive, that had nothing to do with anything. Plausibly, they just begin every letter with some form of obsequious statement of deference? It is the Middle East after all. It could just be a letter that was written to tell them, “We’re going to be doing some repositioning. Just so you know.” Because that’s what they were planning to do this week.
Nope, I tracked down a picture of the real thing. Dated today and explicitly mentions the pullout.
You’d have to be a complete idiot to send a letter saying that you’re pulling out your entire army from a nation, without complete and 100% approval from the top boss.
Yeah, it has a different character. This is a major impact killing internationally. But shake your head a bit here: isn’t killing an American citizen a whole hell of a lot closer to shooting a guy on 5th Avenue than killing a foreign military leader?
Well, Al-Zawahiri had joined the enemy we were actively at war with. Treason, no? Punishable by death, though of course not via drone. But then he was also effectively an enemy combatant and subject to being blown up.
Soleimani was only arguably an enemy combatant, and definitely not formally so. And his death is an assassination of a high level foreign national.
So, two counts against Al-Zawahiri, maybe one against Soleimani. Joe Blow on 5th Ave is minding his own business buying a hot dog, zero counts. By this reckoning Soleimani is closer.
Why in the world are you playing this game? An American citizen is due a trial. He was specifically targeted, not killed in a battle. You have blown all moral high ground, in my rather certain opinion.
Usually I would agree with you, but the sticky wicket in that case was that the dude had joined a terrorist army we were actively at war with. So it wasn’t an extrajudicial execution, it was attacking a known Al Qaeda terrorist. Arguably.
The guy shooting up a Wall Mart deserves a trial too, but usually ends up shot to death by the cops. That isn’t considered an extrajudicial execution either.
More games. Cops killing someone who’s shooting up a Walmart is not like ordering someone’s death as a preemptive measure. Think I’m done with you for the day.
That’s your prerogative but I am not playing games. This is a life or death situation for a whole lot of people and it is worth chewing on all the angles. My principle here is the most uncomfortable questions to ask and answer are often the ones most worth addressing.
A Trump defender will say America is in the business of blowing up terrorists. They might say it is consistent to blow up both Al-Zawahiri and Soleimani. I just want to grind down to the distinctions until I reach a degree of certainty. I apologize if I pissed you off.
When both Israel and Saudi Arabia fail to support a US action against Iran, then you know it must have been spectacularly stupid (if there was any doubt before).
Israel and Saudi Arabia are usually highly reluctant to criticise the US - especially over Iran, which they both hate. So when both of them send the US a diplomatic message to the effect that ‘you screwed up’ it means something.
Anyway, to put the 5th Avenue thing to rest by just going with it, Trump may not lose support among the End-Timers, but when All of our international allies turn away from us, when his biggest fan base is literally demanding the Apocalypse, when thousands of innocent lives are in immanent danger from the threat of a potential war fomented directly by his unlawful actions, maybe the national interest would be better served by a different, more informed decisionmaker.
The most likely options would seem to be that, a) it was a trap, or b) the President has no real memory of who is who and forgot between the phone call with the Iraq PM and his military options briefing that he had just been talking about Soleimani a little while previous.
I’d lean towards b. If a, though, I feel like that’s more advance thinking than Trump is capable of. He’s more the Jack Bauer type than the Batman. He screws everything up when he tries to plan ahead, but blasts his way through it to save himself in real time. This succeeded.