Opening Pandoras Box in Iraq: by Dave LIndorff!
(2020-01-04 at 05:01:45 )

Opening Pandoras Box in Iraq: by Dave LIndorff

Trump Hit on Iranian Commander Puts a Target on His Own and Top United States Generals Backs

As far back as at least the American Revolution, there was an unwritten rule among combatants that you do not kill the commander in the field of battle. That is why generals could be seen directing their troops while sitting astride a horse behind the front lines -easy targets for anyone equipped with a rifled barrel on their long gun to pick off. The reason they felt relatively safe doing so was that it was that both sides understood that if commanding officers were fair game and one were slain, there would be nobody to surrender or order a retreat, and all conflicts would be fought to the death.

Now President Trump has upended that logic by reportedly directly ordering the assassination, by drone-fired missile, of Commander of Iranian Forces Qassem Suleimani, who was on a visit to neighboring Iraq.

Some American media outlets are predictably reporting that Mr. Suleimani was "the worlds number one bad guy" and are reflexively praising Donald Trumps "resolute" response to the allegedly Iranian-sponsored Iraqi attack on the United States Embassy compound in Baghdad.

But aside from the problem that the assault on the embassy was actually a public reaction in Iraq to the United States earlier outrageous and illegal aerial bombardment of an armed unit of Iraqi government-backed fighters, itself a response to the killing of a United States "contractor" (mercenary soldier) in Iraq, what is actually accomplished by blowing up a military leader from Iran while he is inside another country, Iraq, in which the United States actually has troops operating by invitation?

Did Trump and his advisers consider what that insulting violation of Iraqi sovereignty will lead to?

More importantly, do President Trump and whatever moronic advisers he is listening to actually think that by blowing up the head of Irans military they have incapacitated or intimidated Iran?

And do they think that somehow Donald Trump and his own generals are immune from an Iranian retaliation in kind?

Iran may not have the sophisticated missile-firing drones that would allow it to copy Americas action exactly, but its military and intelligence services certainly have skilled snipers, sappers and others technicians of death who are quite capable of taking out a United States general, or even a president, pretty much at will if they decide that is what they want to do.

Donald Trumps act of presidential bravado, about which I am sure we will have to endure much presidential boasting at rallies and in tweet form, is heading us in an incredibly dangerous direction.

The United States has long been an outlaw nation, waging illegal wars at will, and treating the entire globe as a free-fire zone for decades.

But when it returns to the kind of assassination policies it was using routinely during the Cold War years (think Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, as well as attempts on the lives of Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic and Muammar Gaddafi, etc.), it is understandable why President Ronald Reagan, in a rare moment of lucidity in December 1981, signed Executive Order 12333 banning the government-ordered assassination of leaders. (Perhaps he was influenced by his own nearly fatal experience with an assassins bullet in March of that year.)

Going against that Reagan order as President Trump has done, is opening a deadly pandoras box.

Rightly or wrongly (since we still do not know who really assassinated President John F. Kennedy), Reagan and others in Washington,D.C. were concerned that his slaying in 1963 might have been a response by Cuba to a spate of failed attempts by the United States Central Intelligence Agency to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Better to take assassinations off the War Room table, Mr. Reagan apparently decided.

Now we are back in the law of the jungle, courtesy of Donald Trumps hit on Gen. Suleimani.

Americas top military brass need to understand that thanks to their Commander in Chiefs hit job on Mr. Suleimani, they all are now walking around with targets pinned on them. Donald Trump himself, not a man who has ever demonstrated any kind of moral courage in his life, has to know that he has also put a big target on his own ample body.

Then also, there is the threat that this could all escalate into something far worse than tit-for-tat offings of leaders.

Remember, it was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Bosnia, that led to the catastrophic First World War.

Assassinations of leaders may seem to a shallow thinker like Donald Trump like a simple, low-cost-low-risk way of sending a message, but depending upon how the country whose leader is assassinated responds, and how that response is responded to in turn by the country that perpetrated the initial assassination, that initial risk-reward evaluation can quickly be proven deadly wrong.

Already Irans "supreme leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has vowed "harsh revenge" for the assassination of Mr. Suleimani, who reportedly died along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, head of an Iraqi armed force called the Popular Mobilization Force, and four other people in the United States drone strike.

Maybe Donald Trump, who has claimed in the past that he wants the United States to pull out of conflicts in the Middle East, has decided like many a president before him, that looking tough and perhaps even fighting a little war during an election year could help him win re-election. If so he may be in for a big surprise.

The United States of American people have grown tired of Americas endless wars, and are unlikely to cheer for yet another one, especially against a country as big as Iran, which is twice the size of Iraq. He will hopefully pay dearly for this hubristic blunder.

Reprinted here with the permission of "This Can Not Be Happening" The only news organization in the United States to be labeled a threat by the Department of Homeland Security!!