Even more insight, this time from Ramin Mazaheri via the Saker: Anti-terror hero Soleimani a ‘terrorist’? US ‘false-life syndrome’ normal since 2003 http://thesaker.is/anti-terror-hero-soleimani-a-terrorist-us-false-life-synd... ... However, if Vietnam resulted in the average American’s open and persistent refusal to believe their government – which was an important historical first for the US – the Iraq War will prove to have been when the average American retained this same correct skepticism but became unable to publicly admit their disbelief. The Iraq War ushered in a new culture of lying for America, where Americans knew they were peddling total falsehoods, and knew that their listeners knew their claims were falsehoods, but there was a collective agreement to keep spreading these falsehoods anyway. This is how we get to the point where somebody like Soleimani – who had bravely and unequivocally been an anti-terrorist hero – is publicly accused of being a “terrorist” by American leadership. Because Washington’s goals are so imperialist, so rabidly capitalist and so fueled by feudal realpolitik, instead of acknowledging how Soleimani’s leading of the fight against ISIL saved many innocent European and American lives (and even the lives of the mercenary “contractors” from these nations), US Vice-President Mike Pence now absurdly says Soleimani was a part of 9/11. Trump says he is justified to plan bombings of “cultural sites”, even though everyone knows he means mosques. Secretary of State Pompeo says the mob hit was “protecting American interests”, even though the only Americans truly pleased are also Israeli Zionists. In the Vietnam era Americans said en masse that they don’t believe nonsense like this, but the Iraq War has changed American democracy – now many Americans feel compelled to say they believe it… but they actually don’t. To believe that Americans truly believe the endless lies of their post-2003 governments is to assume that Americans are either deluded or mentally disabled, and neither are true: Americans know they are poorly governed but now feel powerless to resist the injustice of their own leaders. Therefore, just as they were marched to war in 2003 even though it was clearly based on the lie of WMDs, the Pentagon and US Deep State are hoping they can start a war with Iran based on more preposterous lies, such as the murder of anti-terror hero Soleimani being justified because he was a “terrorist”. ... Trump himself is certainly not crazy but he is undoubtedly a liar. Pompeo himself openly revealed the sad degeneration of American dishonesty: “… when I was a cadet – what’s the cadet motto at West Point? (West Point is the number one military prep school in the US) ‘You will not lie, cheat or steal or tolerate those who do.’ I was the CIA director – we lied, we cheated, we stole. That’s – it was like – we had entire training courses.” Bush I was a former CIA director, so it’s not as if Pompeo really represents a new development in US neo-fascism (it is “neo” because open US Apartheid is over), but my point here is that prior to Vietnam such things were never openly admitted anywhere in the US; during Vietnam the truth of the anti-democratic nature of the US was hotly debated; during the Iraq War the US government’s foundation of criminality is openly admitted at the very top… and no one cares. In an era when every American is tracked – from credit scores, to the location of their cell phone, to what they wrote on the internet 15 years ago – and people can be droned at will, the average American has no choice to but to pretend that they are going along with it all. It is not all Trump and Pompeo – the executive powers, which reduce the American system to investing a dictator’s powers in the presidency, were installed by Bush II and increased by Barack “Dronebama” Obama. The system has spread to their neo-imperial allies, as proven by France’s 2-year state of emergency, the “French Patriot Act”, and current President Emmanuel “Rubber Bullet President” Macron, who forces through sweeping American-style economic changes via executive order. “False life syndrome” is thus a Western phenomenon, and not only that of their American leader. The epidemic expansion of “false life syndrome” which began in 2003 is also behind the pathetic, woefully unfair reason Soleimani is now dead: The Democratic Party elite refused to admit the real reasons for their democratic unpopularity, so they concocted a diversionary Russophobia campaign as well as a campaign to impeach Trump (i.e., to undemocratically reverse the election). In 2020, to distract from this month’s expected impeachment vote Trump killed Soleimani. It’s more “false life” syndrome, because everyone knows the impeachment is the emptiest of politics as Trump is certain to be acquitted. “Think of the contrast,” top House Republican Kevin McCarthy wrote on Twitter. “While Democrats are trying to remove President Trump from office, the President is focused on removing terrorists from the face of the earth.” In an election year Trump needed another WMD-like falsity to perpetuate, knowing full well that it would be publicly promoted by many, and he so he murdered Soleimani. What a crying injustice that an anti-terror hero died in large part because of immoral, domestically despised, primary school-level US domestic politics! Soleimani was killed to preserve US capitalism-imperialist domination of the Muslim World above all, but the dishonest, unreflective political farce which has reigned since 2003 in America is the leading secondary factor. Everybody in the world knows this modern truth: Washington defines a terrorist as “someone who disagrees with Washington and Wall Street”. Be you Iranian, Iraqi, a journalist like Julian Assange or an average American – oppose US neo-imperialism and neoliberalism and you will be treated as a terrorist. I am certain that the average American realizes this obvious subtext to these slanderous, absurdly false claims against anti-terror hero Soleimani, but it is 2020 and not 1970 – it seems you can’t expect the truth from a huge number of Americans anymore? Maybe we can after the US finally leaves Iraq? On Tue, Jan 07, 2020 at 02:10:56PM +1100, Zigga da Bigga Trigga N.gga wrote:
Soleimani - another perspective:
Arch Terrorist or Ally? Three Times Soleimani Saved American Lives https://sputniknews.com/world/202001061077960305-arch-terrorist-or-inadverte...
... Soleimani is 2015 fighting along American soldiers in Iraq to kill ISIS fighters.. now killed by Trump on all sorts of fabrications. Our foreign policy is psychotic https://pic.twitter.com/iTHppkwhdU
... In late 2001, after a group of 19 Saudi, Emirati, Lebanese and Egyptian hijackers slammed commercial airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 Americans, US officials quietly met with Iranian diplomats coordinated by Soleimani in Geneva. Iran, a long-time enemy of al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, agreed to provide the United States with valuable intelligence on the terrorist group, including the locations of suspected al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Iran was also eager to assist the US in its campaign against the Taliban, since the radical fundamentalist movement was known for its harsh treatment of Afghanistan’s Shia minority, and had attacked and killed 11 Iranian diplomats at the consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998.
In November 2001, Quds Force special forces and US Army Rangers and Delta Force units entered the city of Herat, northwestern Afghanistan, igniting an anti-terrorist insurrection led by Northern Alliance. The unprecedented operation led to the collapse of Taliban control of Herat, and soon the group was toppled from power across the rest of Afghanistan. The Quds Force was known to have provided material support to Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the US-allied Northern Alliance, going back to at least the mid-1990s. Iranian intelligence services continued to provide the US with intelligence until January 2002, when US President George W Bush added Iran to his ‘Axis of Evil’ list of possible regime change targets during his State of the Union address.
... How did Soleimani’s efforts in the Syrian conflict save American lives? For one thing, they helped to tie down tens of thousands of radicals from Daesh (ISIS),* al-Qaeda, and a host of other terrorist groups which could have otherwise scattered to Western countries to conduct Paris or Brussels-style terror attacks. Furthermore, they allowed the US to limit its anti-Daesh operations in Syria to aerial support and limited on-the-ground assistance to Kurdish militias, meaning fewer US service members’ lives put at risk.
... Whether against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, or against Daesh and other terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq, Gen. Soleimani and the Quds Force have consistently fought the same Sunni Islamist Wahhabi fundamentalist forces which have targeted US forces across the Middle East and around the world, and which have vowed to destroy the West and America through acts of terror.
By approving Soleimani’s assassination, President Trump has not only dealt a blow to the forces fighting Daesh and al-Qaeda, but put an irreversible end to the informal, often begrudging, highly unlikely but hugely successful partnership between Iran and the US in the fight against terrorism, and that may put American lives at risk.